http://www.rakuten.co.jp/

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Since its inception in 1997, Rakuten has grown exponentially into one of the largest electronic malls in Japan. Faced with a constant surge in transaction volume, the company reinforced the system with two Sun Fire[tm] 15K servers and completed a major system migration in three short months. The superior flexibility and high performance of the new system has enhanced the customer experience and improved Rakuten's communication with shoppers.

Overview

Founded in 1997, Rakuten, Inc. is often seen as a representative electronic mall in Japan. The company has successfully built a mall where savvy businesspeople can easily open a shop without technical knowledge. Under the slogan "Shopping is Entertainment," Rakuten is continuously expanding its business. The company offers a wide variety of customer services, including the Internet mall Rakuten Shijo (Rakuten Market), a free Web page hosting and Weblog service known as Rakuten Hiroba (Rakuten Square), and Rakuten Furima (Rakuten Flea Market). In 2003, the company launched a new feature giving customers access to all merchandise via Web-enabled cell phone. Through these innovations, Rakuten plans to make online shopping and communication even more enjoyable than before.

The fastest growing among the three principal services is the Rakuten mall, which hosts some 7,000* electronic shops. Its market reach has been doubling every year since inception. To keep up with the surge in transaction volume, Rakuten added two Sun Fire 15K servers in October 2002 to its existing database system built on three Sun Enterprise 10000 servers. Today, these and other Sun servers efficiently handle nearly 600 million mission-critical transactions per month.

Background needs:
Transaction volume outgrew capacity of three Sun Enterprise 10000 servers

Kensuke Hirokawa Deputy General Manager, System Integration Headquarters, Rakuten, Inc.

The system Rakuten initially adopted was a very simple one supported by only one Sun Enterprise 450 server. As the number of mall tenants surged while transaction volume and sales literally doubled each year, the company scaled the system accordingly. The three-tier server configuration (consisting of Web, application, and database servers) was adopted, and the number of servers in each tier was increased as necessary. Starting with just one Sun Enterprise 450 server, the database tier soon scaled horizontally with additional Sun Enterprise 420R servers and vertically through the Sun Enterprise 4500 servers.

At the same time, efforts were made to build redundancy and mission-critical reliability into the system through clustering.

In April 2001, Rakuten installed three Sun Enterprise 10000 servers that were top of the line at the time. Even so, the company could not keep up with the exponential growth of transactions for long without adding even more scalable database servers from Sun.

"We are constantly monitoring the performance of our database servers through such indicators as server-side system/CPU utilization and client-side CGI execution time," says Kensuke Hirokawa, Deputy General Manager of System Integration Headquarters at Rakuten, Inc. "Analysis of these data gives us an insight as to when to migrate the database servers, which allows us to proactively implement our medium- to long-term provisioning plan. As our transaction volume was growing way out of proportion, we rushed to migrate the system to protect our core business."

Smooth upgrading:
Sun Fire 15K servers incorporated in a blink

"We chose the Sun Fire 15K servers because they featured mission-critical capabilities such as Dynamic Reconfiguration and Dynamic System Domains," Hirokawa continues. "Dynamic Reconfiguration allows system boards to be added or replaced even while the database is running. You can also dynamically create up to 18 system domains or partitions in an enclosure. These useful functions -- also available with the Sun Enterprise 10000 servers but further refined on the Sun Fire 15K servers -- made it very easy for us to migrate the system."

The migration project team was established in August 2002. In three months, the team selected the system configuration and hardware, transferred the business data, tested the system and made it production-worthy by November 4. The current system consists of three Sun Enterprise 10000 servers (six domains) and two Sun Fire 15K servers (five domains) configured in a SAN environment. Active domains mainly reside on the Sun Fire 15K servers, which are part of the N+N multicluster HA configuration.

"The Sun Fire 15K server can be dynamically reconfigured without shutting down the system, allowing flexible system operations," Hirokawa says, explaining why it was possible to complete the migration project in such a short time. "We could keep the production system running while we tested the new system. We performed tests in a real-world setting, configuring an optimum new environment within the same cabinet in a very short period."

From the very beginning, Rakuten has adopted Sun's high-performance products in mission-critical operations that demand rock-solid security and reliability. "Because electronic malls handle sensitive data such as personal records and account settlement information, the system had to be absolutely robust," Hirokawa adds. "We looked at commercially available UNIX operating systems and chose the Solaris Operating System for its proven security and excellent support. Another important factor was that there were numerous system engineers specializing in Solaris who formed a valuable communal infrastructure. The excellent compatibility of the Solaris Operating System also guaranteed smooth transition into the new system. The linear scalability of Solaris also ensured that all additional microprocessors brought proportionate increases in performance."

Meeting current and future goals:
Flexibly accommodating future traffic growth with horizontal scalability

"The two Sun Fire 15K servers have proven their outstanding performance and scalability," Hirokawa continues. "Our system has gained extra power and headroom for growth, allowing us to flexibly cope with future transaction increases. Our system consists of over 100 Sun products, including two Sun Fire 15K and three Sun Enterprise 10000 servers. We now have the capacity to scale up to 106 CPUs, and as many as 18 domains can be configured individually or in clusters within a cabinet, thus significantly reducing the footprint and easing the burden of system administrators." Innovative features such as Dynamic Reconfiguration and Dynamic System Domains allow flexible domain configuration and ensure redundancy while averting hardware trouble. With Dynamic Reconfiguration, system boards can be added or deleted without shutting down the system, minimizing the downtime. Since the new system dramatically improves performance per square foot, it also drives down costs and TCO.

	Rakuten's system in operation -- includes Sun Fire 15K and Sun Enterprise 10000 servers

Today's electronic malls need to adopt increasingly complex applications to differentiate themselves and survive, which calls for more sophisticated hardware capable of delivering higher performance. Exercising foresight, Rakuten has already built an advanced system that can comfortably respond to future shifts in demand.

Rakuten is growing steadily toward the goal of attaining one trillion yen in annual transactions and becoming the largest Internet service company in the world. By choosing the advanced Sun Fire 15K servers and other reliable Sun products, the company has gained flexibility and scalability necessary to support its mission-critical tasks.

Hardware: Sun Fire 15K×2 Sun Enterprise 10000×3 Sun Fire 4810×2 Sun Enterprise 4500×6 Sun Enterprise 420R×1 Sun Fire V480×13 Sun Enterprise 420R×64 Sun Fire 280R×7 Netra T1×25 Sun StorageTek S1×10 Sun StorageTek D240×4 Sun StorageTek L700×1

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