Walter Hardy's Blog

I am constantly amazed at how stable Sun Solaris is. Since many of our company websites run on Windows 2003 with IIS, I’m very accustomed to having to reboot servers weekly, and getting early morning wake-up calls from our server watchdogs.

But Solaris–it just doesn’t quit. I had left one production Solaris 10 server running for over 360 days to the point where I was really scared to reboot it. Not because the operating system wouldn’t handle the reboot, but because the hardware just might not come back to life after a momentary loss of power. So I went down to our hosting facility to be in person during a hard reboot, and I was pleased to see it come back on-line without a hitch.

My firm hosts and maintains the student on-line training website for Sun Microsystems: www.SunStudentCourses.com. We built it on the open-source Course Management System, Moodle (moodle.org) and it runs on Solaris 10 with PHP, Glassfish application server and MySQL.

I have also hosted a collaboration system for Sun Microsystems with Sun Java Systems Instant Messaging and Directory Server, as well as a portal system with Liferay—all on Solaris. These systems rarely, if ever crash.

Solaris really is a great choice for a firm who hosts their own websites. Just the fact that operating system instances can be divided into zones on a single machine is a wonderful benefit!

I am excited to announce that we have completed the move of our hosting environment to the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA. This high-tech hosting environment provides us with ample room for growth with additional bandwidth, services and space.

The Plug and Play Tech Center provides both office and hosting space to over 100 startups in Silicon Valley. It provides for an environment where companies can grow, seek venture capitalists and network with each other. The collocation hosting space is first-rate and new, with multi-homed bandwidth, backup power systems and more.

In addition, we have upgraded our ColdFusion hosting environment from several single-server instances to an enterprise system where we are more easily able to launch instances and load-balance our clients’ popular, high-traffic websites.

We continue to also administer and host on Solaris, including Sun Microsystems’ student learning site, SunStudentCourses.com and their collaboration service, share.java.net. To support and host these two key web presences, we run Sun Access Manager, Directory Server, Web Server, Instant Messaging Server, the open-source application server, Glassfish, and the open-source on-line training system Moodle. We are also assisting Sun in the development of new technology for its expansive developer community using the open-source portal server, Liferay.

Relocating our servers to The Plug and Play Tech Center has been a great move for us. Not only are we able to better control costs, we are also provided with abundant high-speed bandwidth and the latest in uninterrupted hosting services. The Center allows us to more easily engage with other growing businesses in the San Francisco Bay area and Silicon Valley. The center is well networked with high-bandwidth pipes to both Yahoo and Google, allowing our Search-Engine Optimization technology to function even more efficiently.