Meet Jacob, our Sun Fire X4200 M2
We’ve recently gotten to the point with our software that it was time to consider deployment and hosting. I did quite a bit of research on the standard hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, IBM, etc., and then found Don MacAskill’s blog over at SmugMug. Don has written some great posts on his datacenter and on their new machines from Sun Microsystems. I grew up using Sun back at Georgia Tech so I’m happy to see them back in the mix.
It’s a big time in a startup’s life when the first server arrives, and we’re proud to introduce Jacob:
Jacob came to us as part of Sun’s Try and Buy program. We get to use the server for 60 days to see what we think, and it’s completely free. They paid for shipping to our office, and they’ll pay for shipping if we send it back before the 60 days is up.The specs of the machine follow this configuration from Sun:
- Two Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.6Ghz chips.
- 4GB RAM
- Two 73GB 10k rpm SAS Drives
- 2U rack space
- ~ $5k list price
We’re part of the Sun Startup Essentials program so our pricing is a good deal better than this. Recommended for startups.
Here are a few more shots of Jacob. Warning–these veer into the geeky and severely fun-deprived world of working hard on a startup. We actually do think putting a Heineken bottle on a server is funny.
First up, me with the server in its box:
We took Mark’s picture also, mostly to highlight that we have at least one sandals-wearing co-founder:
Once we got the box opened and we started setting up the server we just had to open it up. Here are the processors:
So that was cool and everybody was happy. It was time to get busy though.
First we booted into the pre-installed Solaris image. Everything worked, but I’m not as current on Solaris as I am on Ubuntu.
So how hard would be to install Ubuntu? Could we just create a Live CD and let her rip? You bet!
Jacob, like the rest of Bravadosoft, enjoys a refreshing Heineken after a long day.
We’ll keep the blog updated on our work with the server. My guess is that our eventual datacenter (after this Try and Buy) will use mostly the Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers due to their 1U configuration, but we’ll see how it goes.