ComputerJobs.com is the premier IT employment Web site. According to Jack Williams, the company’s senior VP of Product Development and Technology, migration to the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system has brought greatly increased server stability, faster installation, increased performance speed, and simplified administration.
Customer Profile
IT employment Web site ComputerJobs.com has information on over 50,000 jobs and over 100,000 resumes in the United States and around the world, and has a monthly subscription client base. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, its revenues in 1999 were $9.1 million. The company has 138 employees.
The company primarily uses Compaq hardware, with some IBM machines. The company has migrated 40 Web servers to Windows® 2000, and will migrate its internal network later this year.
Servers are the single path to doing business for Internet startups. Because ComputerJobs.com’s Web site is partitioned by job skills, geographic region, and personal profile, a server outage could reduce capacity to a portion of the site. "If our site is down, we have to give money back to our clients," says Williams. "Our competitive advantage hinges on the continuous availability of our entire site."
Dramatically Improved Stability and Quick Migration
Windows 2000 Server has more than met ComputerJobs.com’s expectations. "Windows 2000 has helped us keep a high volume Web site up at a very low cost, in a very stable and efficient environment," says Williams. What has most caught the attention of the company’s 25 developers and site engineers is the tremendous improvement in stability in their production environment. "We have been extremely happy with Windows 2000," Williams says. "Our experience shows that Windows 2000-based machines perform flawlessly under the most demanding conditions, which increases the overall positive perceptions of our site."
ComputerJobs.com was able to migrate its Web servers from Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 to Windows 2000 Server in just under three weeks, at the same time it was making major changes to its data center.
Management Console Simplifies Administration
One reason the company migrated to Windows 2000 Server from Windows NT was to take advantage of simplified, centralized administration. The company supports 40 production servers with a staff of only five site engineers. "With Windows NT 4.0, whenever you had to adjust something, you had to bring up a different tool," says Tim Cederquist, VP of Product Development and Technology. "With Windows 2000, machine setup and production management are simplified because you can make all the adjustments using the Management Console."
Faster Installs and Performance Mean Better Scalability, Happier Customers
ComputerJobs.com wanted to bring its production servers online faster to respond to traffic demands. Since migrating, the company has been able to add new machines into its racks with minimal cost and time, and to ramp from 10 million page views monthly to nearly 20 million per month. "With Windows NT 4.0, installation took about six hours, but with Windows 2000, install time is down to only one hour," Cederquist says. Once the company starts using the Microsoft Active DirectoryTM service in Windows 2000, Cederquist expects installation to take only a few minutes because more of the process can be automated.
For a high-traffic Web site, the speed with which pages can be served is critical. ComputerJobs.com found that Windows 2000 Server improves the delivery speed of HTML and ASP pages by at least 30 percent. "We’ve had many customers commenting on the responsiveness of the new regions as we rolled the Windows 2000 machines into areas of the site they use," Williams says. "Increased performance also helps us control our data-center growth and simplify management by reducing the number of machines required to service our Web site."
Software and Services
Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services 5.0, Message Queuing, and Microsoft Transaction Server
COM+
Exchange Server
SQL ServerTM 7.0
Visual Studio®
