On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Ronen Engler wrote:
> Hi all, I was looking at the www.valinux.com and it seems to be
> interesting, just want to know if someone bought something from them
> or maybe someone will tell me not to do such a thing... i need to
> make a real servers... and it seems they got everything "build-in"
>
> someone?!?
I adore the company! they are a great choice... (but I'm biased)
(warning, rambling of a fan from here on, with some history for the
interested)
VA-Research (they only renamed to VA-Linux a few months back) was born
circa 93-94, when Larry Augustin was still doing his doctorate at
Stanford and working for a small EDA copany. this is before the days EDA
and NT ever met, and many strugling Silicon Valley startup had troubles
affording both the very expensive software licenses as well as the Unix
workstations. Larry was playing with linux and sugested to his boss to
make a port to it. after convincing him that it was almost just a
question of running "make" on one more platform, he proceded to offer it
to customers. but we are talking here about early Linux kernels that
supported nothing... Larry started builiding a few machines as a side
job for customers, only with hardware he knew was supported and sold
them preinstalled. he is assumed to be the first one to ever do so. He
would build them, hack the kernel when needed to make a tighter fit for
the customer and give the support only hardcore fans give :)
when the demand got high and his Doctorate was finished, the demand was
high enough to quit his job and try to make it into a company. a few
dozens of computers a month got him at 98 to about 200 computers a month
and a 12-13 worker office. Ever-concentrating on the community, Larry
struck a friendly agreement with his ISP neighbouring office and got a
100BaseTX connection across the wall to a hub connected by two T3s to
the backbone, and started hosting Debian, Freshmeat and a few other
central projects, he hired more kernel hackers, so he could provide
clients with the best support for the SCSI cards he sold and so on. at
that point I have a tiny connection too, Rob Walker (sysadmin there)
needed someone to share the load with, and since we knew eachother from
SVLUG he offered me the job. I really was interested, even though it was
half the paycheck I got at the time from my employer, just because of
the people who worked there. Alas my Visa didn't permit it and I was not
able to be employee number 15...
about 13 months passed. the hopes and low paychecks payed back afterall.
the Linux big-bang came, VA linux got investments from SGI, Intel and a
few more sources, were commisioned by Intel to do the port of Linux to
Itanium (which ran a beowulf cluster of SGI machines at SuperComputing
99 only 8 weeks after first silicon!) and went on to have a record
breaking IPO on the NASDAQ. with 250 employees and growing, they now
supply hardware to Etoys, Akamai(!!), Deja.com and many more
high-profile, high-availability big hit companies, and ofcourse many
smaller ones too.
but the most important thing is that they haven't lost their sole. it's
a wonderful core of people working there, many of them I knew from SVLUG
long before they went to work there, and it shows it's a company that
rose from the community, and now giving back as much as it can!
http://www.valinux.com/community/
--
Ira Abramov ; whois:IA58 ; www.scso.com ; all around Linux enthusiast
"I don't know why, but first C programs tend to look a lot worse than
first programs in any other language (maybe except for fortran, but then
I suspect all fortran programs look like `firsts')"
(By Olaf Kirch)
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