Recruitment site Fish4.co.uk has saved £2m in less than
12 months by moving its hosteddatabase in-house.
The site, which processes 30 million searches a month, has
switched from a hosted
Sybase database search engine running on Sun hardware to an
internally run
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database using
Unisys ES7000 server hardware.
The company aims to triple its revenue during 2007, but said the
contract it had with its datacentre hosting company would have made
it expensive to scale the database to support this growth.
Richard Yeo, chief technology officer at Fish4, said, "We were
tied to a very expensive contract."
The site was also experiencing technical glitches in its Sybase
database in January and February 2006, Fish4's busiest months for
recruitment, Yeo said.
With the contract up for renewal, Yeo looked for alternatives
and opted for SQL Server. The product shares many similarities with
Sybase, as both were originally based on the same software.
One of Yeo's team spent five weeks moving the Fish4 search
application over to Microsoft SQL Server. The migration involved
200 tables and 800 database objects. A proof of concept of the new
application was ready by March 2006.
Two databases were run in parallel to make it possible for the
IT team to maintain the live Sybase system while developing the SQL
Server version of the site.
"We installed new development work on Sybase first then ported
the code to SQL Server," said Yeo. In August, the site is expected
to add an improved search based on the Fast ESP search engine,
which will use the data in the Microsoft SQL Server database.
Alf Franklin, sales manager at Sybase, said, "Fish4 had
previously signed up to an IT infrastructure that was more
sophisticated than it needed and, as a result, had costs associated
with it that were equally as high."
Sybase said Fish4's performance issues were not specifically
related to the configuration of Sybase, but were found to be
related to Fish4's configuration.
Unisys powers up >>
Optimise your data
delivery system >>
Database market now worth £8bn >>