Looking back at the Cobalt Raq
X13 is doing a hardware refresh next week. It's cold out, which makes hunching over hot servers almost enjoyable, especially for a bit-head like myself.
After a decade of walking behind the curtain and seeing what makes global communication and commerce possible, I have both an enormous appreciation and respect for technology. I used to be the server whisperer. Like a veterinarian or mechanic, I could put my hand on a muggy forehead and make an educated guess about what was ailing the machine. (Hearing the whir of 80's era Mac SE-30 hard drives in today's movies thrills me.)
In February of 2001, I left Sun and decided to dust off my entrepreneurial spirit and jump into the hosting industry. With the help of 3 angel investors (craig m., lori g., ken g.) and a business plan guru (chris n.) I was off and running, purchasing a Sun Cobalt Raq 4 for our first server.
Through the favor of a friend, this little blue pizza box sat inside an Inflow (now SunGard) datacenter, nestled between giant colorless servers owned by MessageMedia (later known as DoubleClick, then absorbed into the largest consumer information company, Google.)
Eventually we grew into our own colocation cabinets, paying $400 per megabit (316GB) of data transferred, and servers were about $5000.
Today, premium bandwidth is under $40/Mb, and servers are about $2500.
After a decade of walking behind the curtain and seeing what makes global communication and commerce possible, I have both an enormous appreciation and respect for technology. I used to be the server whisperer. Like a veterinarian or mechanic, I could put my hand on a muggy forehead and make an educated guess about what was ailing the machine. (Hearing the whir of 80's era Mac SE-30 hard drives in today's movies thrills me.)
In February of 2001, I left Sun and decided to dust off my entrepreneurial spirit and jump into the hosting industry. With the help of 3 angel investors (craig m., lori g., ken g.) and a business plan guru (chris n.) I was off and running, purchasing a Sun Cobalt Raq 4 for our first server.
Through the favor of a friend, this little blue pizza box sat inside an Inflow (now SunGard) datacenter, nestled between giant colorless servers owned by MessageMedia (later known as DoubleClick, then absorbed into the largest consumer information company, Google.)
Eventually we grew into our own colocation cabinets, paying $400 per megabit (316GB) of data transferred, and servers were about $5000.
Today, premium bandwidth is under $40/Mb, and servers are about $2500.
OLD | NEW | |
System | Sun Cobalt Raq 4 | Dell Power Edge |
Processor | AMD K6-2, 450MHz, Single Core, 32-bit | (2) AMD Opteron 2350 (K10), 2000MHz, Quad Core, 64-bit |
Memory | 512MB | 10GB (10,240MB) |
Storage | 73GB | 3TB (3,072GB) |
Software | Red Hat Linux 4 | Debian |