A Real Sun Fan

 Jeff Whitehead, CEO of Real Time Matrix Corporation (RTM), told analysts on today’s “Customer Coffee Chat” call, “I’m obviously a real Sun fan.”

 And why not?  His Oakland-based startup – 11 employees strong – has overcome its scalability, availability, and cost challenges, and is signing up new customers by the boatload.

 RTM uses a patent-pending matching engine to provide streams of real-time information to its customers over the Web. They “unclutter the Web” and make it easy for customers to obtain the news, video, blogs, social media, and entertainment relevant to them.  RTM process 500,000 – 2 million articles a day and must be able to deal with “fast periods” of 100,000 hits at once.

 By switching from Linux on AMD to Solaris 10 on Sun, RTM went from several hundred matches per thread per second to 10,000, a result that Whitehead referred to as “staggering.” The company began its migration to Sun by utilizing the Try and Buy program to purchase a Sun Fire T1000 server. The original plan was to stick with Linux – part of the attraction of choosing Sun in the first place – but Whitehead decided “not to be a guinea pig” and went with the pre-installed Solaris 10 instead. The term ‘guinea pig’ might be a little over the top – he wouldn’t exactly be the first customer to use Linux.

 Two T2000 servers later, RTM boasts of doubling its ad revenue and saving “easily 50%” on power, space, and cooling. Infrastructure savings have been redirected to product and sales. Whitehead also lauded the Sun Startup Essentials program, which offers discounts to companies such as his, and Sun’s Startup Camp, where he has made valuable customer and partner connections.

 Here’s the link to the whole happy story: http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/rtm.xml