Hardware Recommendations

The Sun Startup Essentials program is geared to address some of the most common types of work that today's start-ups are running. Depending on the nature and volume of data, and amount of processing, different types of work can be combined to run together on one server.

As a general guideline, Sun recommends looking at the following hardware platforms for use with each type of work.

Storage and Data Access

Type of Work	Description	Requirements	Recommendation
Data Base	Database engine Example: MySQL PostgresSQL	High CPU utilization High memory utilization Fast and large storage requirements High thread concurrency High network traffic	Sun Fire X4600 Sun Fire T2000
Shared data	Can be structured (e.g.: File) or unstructured (e.g.: XML objects) repository. Example: NFS using UFS, ZFS	Fast and large storage requirements Fast I/O critical Lower utilization of CPU Moderate utilization of memory; additional RAM may add caching Network critical; more interfaces are better.	Sun Fire X4500 Sun Fire X4200 Sun Fire X2200 M2
Index objects	Frequently used for indexing either datafeeds or files on the file system (sometimes databases). Example: Apache Lucene	Scales horizontally; there is usually one system configured to scale vertically to simplify software configurations. High storage requirements Fast I/O critical High utilization of CPU with floating point operations (Apache Lucene) High memory utilization	Sun Fire X2200 M2 Sun Fire X4200