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.

Delivery / UI

Type of Work	Description	Requirements	Recommendation
Dynamic web processing	Running a portal, web application with real-time data interactivity; such as: blogs, wikis, tagging, mashups, etc. Example: Apache (PHP) TomCat JBOSS Sun Java Application Server	Horizontally scalable High CPU utilization Medium memory utilization (due to horizontal scaling) Low storage requirements High network traffic Moderate thread concurrency Application layer may have more configuration needs and complexity; suggests higher need for redundancy or larger capacity	Sun Fire T1000 Sun Fire T2000 Sun Fire X2200 M2 Sun Fire X4200
Static web processing	Responsible for serving out the static or cached information. Not a huge assembly system - takes hits from users and passes them off to other parts of the systems. Example: Apache Sun Java Web Server	Horizontally scalable Medium CPU utilization Medium memory utilization (for caching) Moderate storage requirements High network traffic High thread concurrency Redundancy not as important as the layer is replicated Lower support costs from fewer boxes	Sun Fire T1000 Sun Fire X2200 M2 Sun Fire X2100 M2
Distributed memory caching and proxy server	Caching mechanism for objects, web pages, etc. Example: Memcached Apache Proxy	Horizontally scalable Low CPU utilization Moderate memory utilization Cache servers can be replicated	Sun Fire X2100 M2