“Stocktalklive.com had designed an $8 million data center in
Atlanta with a UUNet backbone and secured rights to Standard &
Poor’s/Comstock Espresso quoting application–a big competitive
advantage. But Stuart Belloff, Stocktalklive.com’s chief technology
officer, explained the paradox: if throngs of users showed up,
up-front technology costs would be frightening. “Due to the
scalability of the [S&P] application, if we were to serve a
million concurrent users, the infrastructure cost would’ve been
enormous–exceeding $30-plus million,” he says.”
“So Belloff, also executive vice president of Jericho, New
York’s 5B Technologies, turned to Linux–and the Professional
Services group of VA Linux Systems. Belloff gave VA an excruciating
60-day deadline to construct a server and software system that
wouldn’t drain Stocktalklive.com’s investment portfolio. “The nice
thing about VA is they didn’t send over a sales staff to scope the
job,” Belloff notes. “They sent over an engineer, and while they
were looking over job, they actually started porting the code
within the first two days of being at the S&P site….”
“Beyond hardware, Larsen says Linux provided compelling
scalability advantages. “The Linux benefit was many, many more
users can query the database at one time, with fewer boxes. That
was a big deal. There are all kind of applications requires
that, and it’s happening at an increasing rate. All kind of Web
sites will benefit. Nothing’s a blanket statement in this business,
but I would say there’s a 90 percent chance your system’s
scalability will get better using Linux.”