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| The Safe Choice For Storage |
| By Joseph F. Kovar
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| May 15, 2000
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Integrators Ally With EMC To Tackle Internet-Driven Need For Storage
Case Study: iWon.com
Solution Provider: Sapient Corp., San Francisco
Client: iWon.com, Irvington, N.Y.
Application: Developing an end-to-end Web portal in five months with a storage system that has the capability of handling 10 million hits a day and 1,000 transactions per second.
When Lee Huu Truong, a San Jose, Calif., student, won $10 million on a nationally broadcast television program last month, he was not the only one cheering.
The program capped an intensive five-month effort by Sapient Corp. to integrate a portal for iWon.com, Irvington, N.Y., which awards daily prizes of $10,000 to Web surfers who click through on the way to news, weather and other features.
When iWon.com first unveiled its plan to have a system capable of handling over 10 million hits a day running within five months, Sapient was skeptical. "None of us really believed it would happen," said Alan Wexler, Sapient vice president.
But working under the pressure of a media campaign touting an April telecast of the first winner, Sapient first set out to find a bullet-proof storage system capable of handling 1,000 transactions per second.
"We looked at the kind of storage arrays that could handle the capacity, and looked to EMC [Corp.]," Wexler said. "We first asked them for a referable client, and they had a system supporting up to 5,000 transactions per second."
For the task, Sapient selected EMC's Celera network-attached storage units, Symmetrix file servers and Veritas Software Corp.'s management software. "We were to be database-dependent," said John Kleine, chief technical officer for iWon.com, whom Sapient helped recruit in the midst of the project. "Our database had to be as hot as it could be, and we needed fail-over protection."
Sapient's solution ultimately included hardware and software from nine vendors, among them Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Vignette Corp. and Inktomi Corp. Because of the time pressure, Sapient had to ensure the vendors' products would work together from day one. "We brought both hardware and software vendors together in the same room. We made sure that not only the products worked with each other, but that the companies would work with each other," Wexler said. "We couldn't miss a date."
Two weeks before the Oct. 5 launch date, the iWon.com site was tested by Sapient employees. Since then, the site has jumped to the top 10 in hits, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Wexler said the project was exciting not just for Sapient but for everyone involved. "This is the first time an integrator went out and built an entire portal," he said. "Yahoo didn't use an integrator. Lycos didn't. And they both had the luxury of building up slowly."
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