March 22, 1999
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IZONE: What is motivating companies to buy your Flagship product, ChiliASP?
Crystle: There are two points of pain. One is problems with NT. If customers are having problems with NT, they can move their ASP applications over to Solaris, and get the benefits of Solaris. We scale on a linear basis on Solaris with Apache, so they can just add more CPUs (to scale vertically) to their Solaris box instead of going horizontal (adding more machines). We see a lot of application servers with built-in load balancing because they actually don't scale vertically--at four CPUs, performance starts to degrade, so they have to [horizontally] add more machines.
Now, IIS as a Web server is really fast. In our internal tests, the Web server itself screams, and it's faster than just about any Web server on Solaris with the equivalent hardware. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve. It's not how fast you can get around the racetrack, the question is whether you can finish the race without crashing.
IZONE: So vertical scaling is when you add more CPUs to a single machine, and horizontal scaling is when you add more machines?
Crystle: Yes. Horizontal scaling is how Microsoft scales with NT, and that's how NetDynamics has to do it with its application server. Eventually these guys will get the vertical scalability too, but in these NT 4.0 level products, they don't have the scalability, so you have to have load balancing. The pain tends to be beepers going off at 3 a.m. IT managers don't want to have to worry about uptime. We've seen companies, [including] one major online portal, [and] they've had to develop something I call "virtual uptime," which detects memory problems on NT Server and automatically restarts the server--not just the application, but the entire server. That's pain. There's a real benefit to running us on Solaris.
IZONE: Are you actively porting to other platforms?
Crystle: We haven't announced a Linux port yet, but we're getting 10 requests a day for it. And companies have been very supportive of our efforts. IBM funded the port to AIX and their S/390. The S/390 port is golden. It's taken a lot longer than we thought, but we'll roll it out, probably by June. It's amazing to see a Web application with server-side scripts and Java objects running on this mainframe. It's excellent--you get all the benefits of that really nicely partitioned OS, and the workload manager. It's really cool.
IZONE: What platforms are selling the best?
Crystle: We're about to launch our ISP program, that's where we're getting our most traction. But we're doing about 50% on NT and 50% on Solaris with Netscape Enterprise Server. With ISPs, it's Solaris and Apache, which just started shipping. On NT, we're selling mostly to Lotus Domino customers, but also to some Netscape and O'Reilly customers.
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