| Gene Diveglia is a Sun worshipper. As vice president of
information services for Intelligence Network On-line
(Clearwater, FL), he's convinced that Sun hardware and
Solaris 2.5 are the best possible solutions for his
fast-growing company. Intelligence Network On-line is a business-oriented Internet service provider (ISP). It also provides a wide array of other Internet services for businesses, such as Web pages and custom networks for companies that have remote operations and need a WAN with Internet access. Intelligence currently has about half a dozen corporate customers whose hundreds of employees regularly use E-mail, newsgroups, and Web services. Another client is a local county government with thousands of employees. In addition, Intelligence provides Internet services to several thousand individual subscribers. The Web sites maintained or leased by Intelligence collectively receive about two million hits per month. To support this business, Intelligence has a ton of Sun hardware. Half a dozen 490- and 690-class servers with dual CPUs handle most of the transaction-based services, such as E-mail, news, Web browsing, shell accounts, and authorization. Four smaller servers — Sun SparcStation Classics and LXes — handle Domain Naming System (DNS) name resolution, manage the network-wide databases, and provide accounting services. Two more Sun servers are primarily for in-house development and operations. There are also about a dozen SparcStations for internal use. Everything ties into a three-segment network. One segment is the internal network for the desktop workstations. Another segment is a local backbone that carries most of the transaction-based activity. Finally, there's an external backbone for the WANs, frame-relay networks, and connections to other service providers. Intelligence is now migrating its internal backbone onto ATM and will experiment with moving the WANs onto ATM soon. Why is Intelligence exclusively a Sun shop? Diveglia says that Sun and Solaris offer the best combination of performance, reliability, and security. While some Internet service providers are bootstrapped startups that cater to hobbyists, Intelligence is a more established provider that specializes in corporate and governmental clients. "That makes us more conscious of security, performance, and reliability issues," he says. "Unix has been around for so many years that it's pretty well understood," Diveglia points out. "But the PC market and Windows applications have undergone such hyper growth stages that it's difficult to believe they have the same completeness and level of understanding that exists in the Unix market." In addition, says Diveglia, Unix systems are capable of handling more traffic than PC-based servers. "The PC architecture just doesn't support the kind of multitasking we'd like to see in a heavily transaction-based environment like the Internet," he explains. "On the Internet, you've got lots of activities happening simultaneously: news transfers, mail services, authentication, authorization processes, accounting processes. NT just didn't address that in a server environment." Although he acknowledges that NT is an up-and-coming OS, Diveglia points out that Unix isn't exactly standing still. Unix in general, and Solaris in particular, continue to evolve and improve. "It's become more attractive over time, not less."  Gene Diveglia, Intelligence Network On-line
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