In 2002, Joots began as a website development company with a focus on marketing for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii, Joots brings world-class brand building, design and web marketing to the local community and beyond. The company has built websites for local restaurants, as well as for larger chains like Jamba Juice and Starbucks, who want to create special marketing campaigns to target the loyal Hawaiian customer-base.
Joots has quickly grown its clientele and broadened its initial offerings by providing not only website development, but also site maintenance, and web application and software development. The company recently expanded even further to offer comprehensive solutions to organizations looking for private networks in addition to websites. When they first extended their services, Joots paid a third-party company to host the web sites they developed. They soon realized the drawbacks of having remote hosting: sites went up slower than they would have liked, and mishaps like server crashes were entirely out of their control.
“We'd been building websites for a while and when the opportunity to get a server rack presented itself, we decided to take advantage of it,” said Matthew Putegnat, the CIO at Joots. “Rather than pass these profits to another company, managing our own server rack gives us the unique opportunity to take our clients from start to finish.”
In June 2006, Joots chose a colocational data center to ensure security and a reliable provision of power and cooling systems. Although their server rack with Equinix is remote, Putegnat is able to visit the data center to maintain the servers.
“Our customers then came to us for the server, for website development, and for the monthly maintenance of software and hardware,” explains Putegnat. With the Joots' growth trajectory and a larger number of applications running on dedicated machines, the company began researching server virtualization.”
By July 2006, Joots was investigating how they could optimize their rack and decided to deploy XenServer Enterprise Edition, Citrix's flagship highest-capacity commercial server virtualization product.
“After my research, I found that Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition would do an excellent job, if not a superior job, to the other available virtualization solutions,” says Putegnat. “I was also under the impression that it had some of the least amount of real overhead for a virtual machine – making the performance incomparable.”
For Joots, XenServer's unique approach to virtualization, paravirtualization, and its advantages—a smaller code base, greater security, and less overhead than alternative virtualization approaches—contributed to their decision to virtualize with XenServer Enterprise Edition.
Citrix XenServer's price and open source roots also made the solution attractive to Joots, a company that is familiar with open source software and has implemented it when possible. In the end, performance coupled with an affordable price convinced Putegnat to deploy the product. After loading the beta version of XenServer Enterprise Edition and testing it in July and August, XenServer went into production at Joots in September 2006.
Since deployment, Joots has no longer had to deal with the frequent server downtime they experienced with third-party hosting vendors. Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition has given Joots the ability, at a relatively minimal cost, to retain the profit they would otherwise pay the third-party vendor, and to quickly and simply provision another virtual server when one is needed. Previously, it was not uncommon for sites to be down for periods longer than an hour.
XenServer has also allowed for the quick scripting and pushing of sites to newly provisioned virtual servers. “When it came to provisioning an IP address,” says Putegnat, “we would use the tools that came from the vendor that was hosting our systems, and it could take up to a half hour to get MySQL deployed because it didn't necessarily come with a new machine.” Now Joots is able to configure new virtual servers exactly as they wish by deploying clones.
Although much of their work is still done without scripts, the overall time for Joots to get a customer's website up and running has been significantly reduced. Prior to XenServer, they would FTP 50 to 100 megabytes to their remote host and it could take up to an hour and a half. Now, they can upload that much data to their servers in a matter of minutes.
Joots has also been especially pleased with Citrix's customer service. When they found a corrupted configuration of a server without a recognizable cause or how to fix it, they called the company on a Sunday and within an hour developers reconfigured the system. “I understand problems. What I don't like is problems without solutions,” says Putegnat. “These guys were just on it. I was pretty impressed, to be honest. There is a passion to offer excellent service”
For Joots, the transition from providing only website design to providing a complete network solution has been smooth. XenServer's simplicity and ease of use allowed Putegnat to focus on perfectly configuring Joots' virtual machines rather than figuring out how to create them. “If I want another virtual machine, the interface allows me to enter the IP address and immediately, there it is—instantly accessible. That, to me, is gold.”
Joots currently has an administration server, a failover server, and a server that hosts 22 to 25 Linux-based virtual machines that in turn host a total of 50 websites and applications. As Joots rapidly continues to grow, they plan to add to their rack, which has space for 40 servers. In the near future, they would like the provisioning of virtual servers, websites, and website applications to be scripted so that deployment consists of pushing a few buttons.
“Eventually, we'd like it so that we have a virtual machine, Apache, and a content management system running on MySQL, and all that we need is a domain name to get our customers up and running,” said Putegnat. “XenServer's back-end scripting tools will be very important to the achieving this.”
Ultimately, Joots wants to provide their customers with their own virtual servers and enable them to control these machines through a visual interface. “We want to play in a bigger pond,” concludes Putegnat, “and Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition has given us that ability.”
For more information, please call 650-798-5900 or visit www.citrix.com