Supporting both the Linux and Microsoft® Windows NT® platforms was a big headache for Goinvest.com, an online content and applications provider. The company decided to standardize its server and desktop environments on Windows® 2000 in order to have a single, reliable, easily supported, and scalable platform. Goinvest.com has gained greatly improved stability, scalability, and ease of administration—all contributing to a lower total cost of ownership.
Customer Profile
Based in Santa Monica, California, Goinvest.com is a business-to-business provider of private label online financial data, content, and technical analysis tools. Goinvest.com solutions allow clients to integrate financial content into their own Web sites, quickly and affordably.
Founded in 1997, the firm has 42 employees and projects $3 million in sales for 2000. Goinvest.com has deployed Windows® 2000 on its 21 servers and 45 desktops.
"We’re completely thrilled to be standardized on the Windows 2000 platform," says Jeff Fenley, Goinvest.com’s president. "It’s the answer to everything we’ve been looking for."
A Noticeably More Stable, Robust Platform
According to Fenley, the stability of Windows 2000 is a marked improvement. "With Linux, we had to restart our servers on an average of once every week or two," says Fenley. "But now, we haven’t had to restart our servers running Windows 2000 for several months. Problems with restarting computers or computers freezing up have been completely eliminated."
Fenley projects that the increased stability will lead directly to a lower total cost of ownership of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars because each IT staff person can now support more desktops and more servers, resulting in lower expenditures on support staff. "The computers are not crashing, so IT staff are not spending time solving user problems such as recovering corrupted or lost files," Fenley says.
Fast Scalability for Internet Volumes
Goinvest.com’s online content clients include banks, brokerage firms, and Web portals. They expect service regardless of the volume of Web traffic, so scalability is a top priority. "If a Web portal suddenly launches an advertising campaign and they need to gear up for increased traffic, we have to scale our system right away," says Fenley. Ad campaigns, for example, can suddenly spike in volume from 100,000 hits per day to 3 million.
Scaling with two different operating systems was a serious troubleshooting challenge, especially with systems that did not scale easily. "Scalability with Linux was difficult—we couldn’t add and load balance machines without additional load balancing hardware," Fenley says. "With Windows 2000, whenever we start experiencing increased loads we can add another box very quickly." The company expects that smooth scalability will help considerably when it replicates its West Coast data center on the East Coast.
Fenley is especially pleased about Windows 2000’s load balancing capability. "It performs wonderfully," he says. "We evaluated the hardware load balancing with Cisco equipment. We decided that the Windows software solution for load balancing was much more effective for us."
Ease of Administration Makes IT More User-Friendly
A big bonus for Goinvest.com’s IT staff is that Windows 2000 is easy to administer. "We’re finding the Windows environment much easier and more user-friendly to administer than Linux," Fenley says. "The GUI is more intuitive and standardized." Goinvest.com has also had great results with the flexibility of remote administration offered by the Terminal Services component of Windows 2000. Fenley reports that using Windows 2000 has also helped the company attract and retain platform developers more easily.
Software and Services
Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Internet Information Server 5.0
Exchange Server 5.0
Office 2000
Site Server 3.0
SQL ServerTM 7.0
