Press Release by Alex Bajan of RAQport.com  CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance as worthy successor of the RaQ550  and Sun Cobalt line.

The sudden demise of the Sun Cobalt RaQ has left ISPs and hosting companies with a time bomb: hundreds of thousands of RaQ servers worldwide starting to wear out with no viable replacement. Fortunately, Centos Blue Quartz is the answer.

Since 1998 Cobalt RaQs have dominated the hosting market. Hundreds of thousands of these massively popular servers are still in service today hosting millions of web sites worldwide. The reason for the popularity of the product was quite simple; it was easy to deploy and easy to manage. This allowed ISPs and hosting companies to provide a high level service to their customers without the high costs associated with managing their web sites for them. The RaQ s software gave the customer control of the website whilst the ISP looked after the hardware.

In late 2000, Sun purchased Cobalt Networks Inc., scooping up both the company's server line and Cobalt's sales force in a stock-for-stock deal worth about $2 billion.

In an orientation training directly after the "merger" (as they called it at the time, partially to keep Cobalt folks happy and partially to justify the $2bn cost), Sun's HR folks swore that one of the reasons that Sun bought Cobalt was to teach Sun how to move like a small company again. Trying to get 250 so people to infect a culture of nearly 40,000 (at the time) was ridiculous. It has taken -years- for Sun to see the big picture on Linux and it still don t seem to get the real picture.

Statement from the former Cobalt Sun employee:

"Being an ex-Cobalt and Sun employee, I would love to tell you a little more. First off, even though I was fairly early into Cobalt, not all of us made lots of money; in fact I made what I can only say was peanuts. It is fair to say the only Porsche I could have afforded would have been a dinky toy. Sun treated us like second class citizens, and the Sun reps were negative about Linux, and did not want to sell the products.

Cobalt was the best product on the market, there is still really nothing like it out there. Interesting point to make is that have a look at the latest IDC figures, appliance servers are well up in figures, well above the estimates, with none of the big boys their, oh and Sun, oh that's right, they have killed their only appliance off."

In late 2000, Ed Zander (then president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Inc. and now recently tapped as CEO and president of Motorola) said of Sun's Cobalt server line: "We think the demand for these high-volume, turnkey devices will explode in the next couple of years. Cobalt is our bet for the future."

That future lasted only three years. On February 2004 the company announced that it will discontinue the last model in its Cobalt product line, the RaQ 550 server, following September end-of-life notices for the rest of the Cobalt line.

Although the Cobalt line of 1U servers proved popular. According to Netcraft statistics, the number of sites hosted on Cobalt's has declined from a peak of 3.1 million hostnames and 942,000 active sites in August 2002 to 871,000 hostnames and 511,000 active sites in November 2004.

Today s challenge for ISPs is how to move customers websites from an ageing RaQ to a new server without having to migrate each one by hand, whilst preserving the familiar interface that loyal customers have grown to love. With most ISPs having exhausted their supply of RaQ spare parts, they can no longer afford to wait before finding an alternative platform. However, the task of porting customers websites is expensive, time-consuming and problematic.

What ISPs are desperate for is a fast, affordable and easy-to-use solution which allows them to migrate customer web sites whilst retaining the same user interface. This was the task that  Centos Blue Quartz set themselves: to design a replacement product and a migration tool that would meet this need. The result is the Centos Blue Quartz server sold by RAQport.com Arlington Virginia Company and Solar speed.net in Germany

CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance as worthy successor of the RaQ550. It is much faster than a RaQ550. Also, all hardware components readily available from any well sorted computer retail store, so spare parts should never be an issue. The software (OS and GUI) are open source projects with a pretty active developer- and user-base.

We have ported our RaQ550, RAQXTR and RAQ4 software to the CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance and extras like the SPAM-Filter, AV-Suite, Security Package, php, MySQL, Aw-stats, MRTG and latest PHP/MYSQL

Aside from offering professional installation services we also plan on releasing certain pre-packaged software for free for this new and exciting platform.

Product Configuration allows you to customize your Server Appliance with the type of chassis, CPU, hardisk and RAM you need.

Centos Blue Quartz have taken the strategic decision to retain the RaQ's innovative and popular user interface. This means that customers migrating to the Centos Blue Quartz Servers will not have to worry about a steep learning curve. All of the tools for creating and maintaining their websites and e-mail accounts will look and operate in exactly the same way as they did before. As Alex Bajan RAQport CEO explains, There is a huge loyal customer base that has kept faith with the product because of its simplicity and ease of use. Our aim was to retain all of the things that made the original RaQ a success whilst solving the immediate challenge of sustainability. Centos Blue Quartz Server takes advantage of the latest developments in hardware technology offering significantly more performance and capacity than the original RaQ product. This means that ISPs will be able to host more domains on each server meaning more revenue per square meter of rack space they key to profitability in this competitive industry.

Another concern that Centos Blue Quartz have addressed is the issue of ongoing product development. A team based in the US, Germany and Australia is responsible for maintaining the product and ensuring that it continues to meet the requirements of the web hosting industry. Centos Blue Quartz ensure that the Server OS is kept up-to-date with the latest security releases. One of the advantages of the Centos Blue Quartz over the original RaQ is that critical updates and security patches are downloaded and installed automatically every night without requiring any user intervention. This is of real benefit to ISPs who have many servers to maintain as they can virtually leave them to manage themselves.

Centos Blue Quartz and RAQport.com development team also tackled a number of the RaQ s other shortcomings prior to launching the Server. The old e-mail server software Sendmail with Qpopper was replaced with the more feature-rich and secure applications. The Apache web server and associated development tools such as PHP and Perl were also updated to the latest stable versions. Alex Bajan of RaQport.com explained the reasons for adopting this approach, We wanted to maintain as stable a product as we could and this meant selecting the latest software components and a market-leading version of the Linux operating system [Centos Blue Quartz] rather than developing our own as other vendors have done. The customer benefits because security patches are released faster, the product is more reliable and their investment future-proofed.

Perhaps the most attractive feature of Centos Blue Quartz for existing users of the RaQ is the in-built migration tool CMU.  Michael Stauber of Solarspeed.net, explains the advantages of this software utility, CMU and enables ISPs to rapidly migrate any number of domains, websites and e-mail accounts from a RaQ server to an BlueQuartz Server Appliance in a matter of minutes. The process is simple and secure and requires no specialist training. As a result downtime is minimized and customer satisfaction maintained.

Let's say you own a Cobalt RaQ and have plenty of software from us installed. Like the AV-Suite, SPAM-Filter, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and the Security Package. Or any other paid software install that we offer. Do you need to buy the software again if you decide to move on to a CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance? No. We offer to migrate the software for you based on our upgrade pricing list $75.00 for application.

Sites, users, mailing lists and settings can directly be imported with the built in CMU from any Cobalt RaQ. So this is an inexpensive way to trade the aging Cobalt RaQs against much more modern hard- and software, while retaining the well known functionality and GUI interface.

 A CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance can do everything a RaQ550 can do as well (minus FrontPage and Chilisoft ASP) - and it does it much faster. The serial ATA hardisks have a throughput of approximately 50 MBit/seconds and even the basic model with a 3.0GHz CPU outperforms a RaQ550 by several magnitudes.

Aside from the speed there are other compelling reasons to consider replacing existing RaQ3, RaQ4, XTR and RaQ550 with a CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance:

• Security: The much more modern operating system uses an up to date 2.6-kernel. All system libraries and daemons are as modern as one would expect from a good operating system. Additionally CentOS provides updates on a regular basis which can easily be installed to keep the system current and to make sure that it doesn't get exploited through vulnerabilities. In that regards a "real" RaQ550 is pure hacker bait, even if you install all patches and extra security measures.
• Stability: A "real" RaQ550 suffers from too many proprietary modifications. Especially in regards to the kernel's memory management, which make a RaQ550 inherently unstable - especially under moderate or high load. Dirty hacks in Apache to implement FrontPage and ASP support, as well as the Sausalito-enabled PHP-4.0.6 library lead to instabilities of Apache, as well as to memory leaks. Also, on a RaQ550 Procmail (used for local email delivery to mailboxes) has been modified in a fashion that it no longer can report certain signal exceptions back to Sendmail in case the email delivery to the mailbox fails. A CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance doesn't have these problems, as the base OS is for the most part (aside from modifying some config files) left unmolested.
• Spare parts and replacements: Ever paid an unreasonable sum for spare parts like fans, rack mounting brackets, replacement hardisks or extra memory? All parts used in a CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance are readily available from any well sorted computer hardware store (as well as from us). This also includes motherboard and case. Aside from that the operating system is not tied to the hardware.
• Flat learning curve: If you are already familiar with running a Sun Cobalt server appliance (especially an XTR or RaQ550), then you have very few new tricks to learn. The CentOS + BlueQuartz Server Appliance's GUI is almost identical to that of a RaQ550 and neither neither your webhosting customers, nor you yourself have to adapt much.

Cobalt's range of servers became dominant in the marketplace because they satisfied the ISP community's need for an affordable yet powerful solution that allowed ordinary non-technical users to maintain their own websites and e-mail. This combination of functionality and low-cost was one of the factors that contributed to the dot com boom of the late 90s. Although the boom has subsided, all of those RaQ servers are still there albeit starting to creak somewhat as their workload increases. With CentOS + BlueQuartz Server's, ISPs and hosting companies can build on customer loyalty by providing improved performance, security and reliability. The CentOS + BlueQuartz Server retain what was best about the RaQ and builds on it, producing a state-of-the-art solution that will appeal to new users and loyal customers alike.

Thanks to the Open source project by Centos Blue Quartz the hard and dedicated work of all former developers, employees of Cobalt Networks and Companies from all over the World like RAQport of Arlington Virginia US, Solarspeed of Germany  the cobalt Server idea is flourishing to the new level.  The order are just keep coming and export worldwide accounting for 40% of sales just for RAQport.