We've chosen our hardware partners based on years of experience with their solutions, rather then marketing hype.
To be confident in delivering a highly-available and reliable service, we need to know the hardware platforms we provide intimately, even to the level of becoming recognised and certified partners.
Servers: Dell, HP and Sun
iWeb Hosting have been using Dell since the introduction of the 6th generation range, and the SC1425 and SC1435 were a staple server product for several years.
Now, we're working with Dell on introducting the latest R900 and R905 solutions for customers needing maximum performance.
During this time we've come to appreciate the level of control that Dell's out-of-band management controllers provide, the excellent price/performance ratio, and the bredth of their range from entry level all the way to quad-socket application servers.
HP have come to dominate the enterprise by offering features sympathetic to companies making large deployments of their equipment.
The most relevant for us are their iLO out-of-band controllers, and the extremely stable system image they provide within each generation of servers.
This stable image lets us easily build templates for both deploying many servers at once, and growing server farms organically, without finding out the model that we built our templates around is no longer available.
Sun servers present the best choice for deploying single instance dedicated MySQL servers, and Java™ application servers, running on either Solaris 10, OpenSolaris or Linux.
More than "just" a server provider, Sun also provide the most impressive iSCSI SAN product available, the Sun Storage 7000, combining impressive engineering, low power consumption, and the extreme flexibility of their ZFS filesystem.