Apache Foundation does, but then, they got a free box. I recently got a tour of Stanford’s data center, and was interested to see that they are moving off of Sun platforms for a variety of reasons: cost, lack of timely support from their Sun reps, Linux is almost as good, and did I mention cost?

I went to Stanford grad engineering school back in the dawn of the personal computing era in year [mumble]. Back then if I could have gotten into Forsythe Hall I would have seen a lot of DEC and IBM gear. Now there is a single IBM mainframe, and DEC is long a memory. Ironically, the robotic tape library that supports it dwarfs the mainframe itself, and the clusters of Intel boxes occupy most of the floor.

Even though the Stanford data center is in an air-conditioned, raised floor type of place, the technicians have to be careful where they place the gear because the PC platforms can output plenty of heat. I was interested to see that there are “hot” and “cold” rows of gear in alternating rows around the floor: depending on the server, you might not be able to densely pack them on racks because they will cook.