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Well basically not. However, we did get invited to hear about their Startup Essentials program, a promotion plan aimed at startups. The meeting took place at their local (Re: Israel) branch, which is located in a giant building complex in the commercial sector of Herzelia (Pituach). Calling it a building complex is actually quite literal - as we actually needed a map to find the right building, another mini-guide to get to the right floor, security doors bypass, visitors permit, auto-guiding laser turrets shutdown code… complex.

We sat down with a marketing executive in a ’small’ meeting room. I’ll comment now that despite the difficulty of finding their office, it’s pretty well stocked with fresh fruit in the lounge, big showoff SUN servers near the reception and so forth. The ’small’ meeting room was no different. I guess this is what being enterprise is all about

We exchanged business cards and introduced ourselves and what we do at a record time of 20 seconds (we are getting better at this). We then got to hear a 10 minute tirade of what SUN is in ‘general’, only it wasn’t very general at all with the marketing guy apparently going on in great detail about the architecture of their latest SPARC chipset and other technical jargon that was pretty difficult for me to swallow. I mean, I’m as technical as the next guy (by the way, I’m CTO here at Octabox ;)) but when someone tells you “Where were you 8 years ago? We at SUN were just coming with this great chipset / server/ OS thingamabob… “, you have to wonder. Oh, and 8 years ago I just finished high-school… Talk about a generation gap.

Ok, so what does SUN have to do with startups? A quick recap: In the .com bubble period, SUN grew tremendously by selling servers and services to startups who had a lot of VC money to spend around. The bubble proceeded to blow up, startups stopped buying SUN servers, SUN decided that startups aren’t good money and went on to provide servers and services to enterprise corporations. All is well, until youtube sells for 1.65$ billion to google, and shockingly enough, SUN has no foothold in this deal.
Are you shocked? Well I certainly wasn’t but apparently SUN executives process such worldly events differently. This great disaster prompted SUN to once again try to appeal to small startups, in the hopes that the next youtube will be using SUN servers and Solaris OS.

I have to say when I heard this story all I thought was how contradictory SUN’s attitude is to ours. Our motto is “Helping small businesses” - We think the power is with the people, so to speak, not with the money. Also, by cultivating small businesses and giving them great service you create loyalty - which will pay itself back when those small businesses grow to become big businesses. I could look at my partner’s face and see he was thinking the same thing.

So SUN now wants startups such as ourselves to see the light and bask in their obviously superior products and services. Awesome. So what can SUN offer us? Two things - Servers and Server OS. This all sounds great if we were in the server startup business. And while I’ve heard good things about both their OS and their servers, at the end of the day I rather leave such decisions to professionals - our hosting company. As long as I have the performance I need and the scalability options I want, it really doesn’t matter to me whether my LAMP based service is running on Xeon based redhat server or SPARC based Solaris server.
By the way, we love our hosting providers servint. Over the years we had several unusual requests and they never failed to provide. Their service and support are top notch, and other hosing providers should take heed - You are in the service business, not the serving business. Also, we just got a small bandwidth and storage bonus to our account for free, which appears to be an annual giveaway from servint. Again, service!

I have been doing some research recently on scaling and server performance, reading some interesting stuff about wikipedia’s setup and about comparisons between SUN and Intel based servers, which is all very informative - And this just reinforces my belief that when we have the funds, we will hire an expert to handle our scalability issues instead of trying to do everything ourselves.