Thursday March 01, 2007

Diary of a startup - Weeks 8 and 9: hardware ordered!

I met "Monty," the CIO, for dinner this week. I hadn't seen him for a while, and I was struck by a certain look of fatigue that he doesn't usually have. Startups are hard work. He came alive as we talked about the company, though, and took me through the latest developments.

His hardware plans have coalesced into actual orders: two HP quad-core rack-mounted servers, one backing up the other. Running VMWare, each will host between three and five virtual machines, one for each major application.  As Jonathan is fond of noting, this style of server consolidation is the wave of the future, to save both space and, more importantly, power.

Ironically, the servers will be housed at a co-location facility that Sun recommended. It's out near LAX, run by a major telco. These co-location facilities use the same strategy that the Dodgers use when they sell you a beer for eight bucks. Monty tells me that they charge $600 a month for one 20-amp circuit! Now I understand why saving power is so critical.

On the integration software side, Monty decided against Oracle Fusion, and will go with BEA middleware. Poor BEA. Little did they know that Monty was raised in a family of militant trade unionists, and absorbed negotiating tactics along with his morning cornflakes. BEA first quoted a rip-off price, but Monty countered by threatening to use an open-source stack based on JBoss, and BEA folded like a poker player with a busted flush. That's the great thing about open source -- you don't even have to use it to reap the benefits.