Sun servers offer S&P scalability, reliability

When S&P began moving its content from print to the Web five years ago, it was running a mixed server environment. The servers held the PDF documents customers were downloading over the Internet. That scenario only lasted two years, though.

S&P's Investment Services division ultimately standardized on Solaris-based servers because its engineers believed that doing so gave them "the scalability and reliability we were looking for," says Brian Whitehead, vice president and chief technology architect at S&P. Even then, highly reliable servers were needed to support the numerous queries being made to S&P's database servers, not to mention the Web links to those database servers.

More than 100 Solaris servers, most with multiple processors, power all the number-crunching and push the editorial content out to S&P's customer Web sites. "We have two of everything, and in some cases, four or five of everything," Whitehead says. For instance, E4500s run the application server layer, two E450s operate the database, four or five E250s house the Web sites, and there are many more small servers that host the other software. The hardware duplication provides the redundancy for the network. The Web servers are supported by Resonate's Dispatch load-balancing software, while the iPlanet Application Server software includes load-balancing functionality. Firewalls running on Solaris servers, along with a mixture of Cisco switches and Nortel Nortel routers, sit in front of all this equipment and software.

With mainframe levels of service and reliability (99.9 percent and above), the Sun servers can support the large number of page views its customized client Web sites get each month as well as the database queries generated through those client sites.

"We're in the B2B business, so our customers are Merrill Lynch and T. Rowe Price," Whitehead explains. "If we go down, people like that call. So we need to be there 100 percent of the time."