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When building Canada's largest Canadian-owned Portal on the Internet,
reliability, scalability and functionality were all paramount. The computer
systems Sympatico-LYCOS chose had to be robust, possess high availability, have
a stable operating system and be scalable. The Sun Enterprise 420R server
from Sun Microsystems was chosen as the fundamental building block for the
Sympatico LYCOS Portal with Sun's Solaris Operating Environment as the
standard OS. A highly reliable, scalable and available computing platform was
required to meet Sympatico-LYCOS' goal to deliver services to customers with
minimal unplanned downtime.
"Meeting our users expectations is equally important to us. Sympatico-Lycos logs more than 8 million unique visitors each month. Traffic on our site--our news section in particular--tripled for the first 48 hours following the September 11th tragedy. For several days thereafter traffic held at roughly double what it was prior to the attack as millions of Canadians chose our site as their source of news, information and context on the attack. The Sun systems performed virtually flawlessly. The Sun systems scale horizontally making expansion an easy task as demand grew. Augmented with Sun Enterprise 450 and Sun Enterprise 220R servers, the Sun environment supports the main Sympatico.ca home page in English and French as well as the personalized home page, My Sympatico. Other properties that are running on our Sun platform include our free web hosting site and our Local City Sites. Sun Microsystems has always been in the forefront of server development so as its technology moved forward and our needs increased we began using the new Sun Fire 280R server as our fundamental building block as well as much larger vertically scaled 16-way Sun Fire 6800 server. Mission critical backend database subsystems were moved to this environment due to mainframe-class availability and resource management features of the robust Sun Fire 6800 system. In short, our relationship with Sun Microsystems of Canada has been a very good one, a relationship which we intend to continue to foster in the future. These systems scale horizontally making expansion an easy task as demand grew. Augmented with Sun Enterprise 450 and Sun Enterprise 220R servers, this environment supports the main Sympatico.ca home page in English and French as well as the personalized home page; My Sympatico. Other properties that are running on our Sun platform include our free web hosting site and our Local City Sites. Sun Microsystems has always been in the forefront of server development so as its technology moved forward and our needs increased we began using the new Sun Fire 280R server as our fundamental building block as well as much larger vertically scaled 16-way Sun Fire 6800 server. Mission critical backend database subsystems were moved to this environment due to the fault tolerant robustness of the Sun Fire 6800 system. In short, our relationship with Sun Microsystems of Canada has been a very good one, a relationship which we intend to continue to foster in the future." Malcolm Whitehead
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