Cobalt Networks

Cobalt Networks was a manufacturer of low-cost, Linux -based servers. The company was purchased in 2000 by Sun Microsystems and ceased production in 2003.

History

The company was founded in 1996 in Mountain View (California ) under the name Cobalt Microserver. She was a pioneer in the market of easy to use server with secure web user interface for Internet service providers (ISPs ) and small and medium-sized companies. After cobalt IPO in 1999 under the ticker symbol COBT the price soared from an initial price of $ 22 $ 128.13 at market close.

In September 2000, Sun Microsystems announced the intention to compete with other providers of Linux -based servers in buying Cobalt for two billion dollars in the form of Sun shares. The acquisition was closed in December 2000. Sun Cobalt products had at the beginning or some success, but soon dramatically waned with the decline in the ISP market. In 2003 Sun Cobalt pulled the products from the market and published the related software and firmware as open source.

Products

Cobalt Networks has manufactured many types of server appliances. The two most successful were the cobalt RaQ3 and RaQ4. The RaQ3 had a 300MHz AMD K6 -2 processor, while the RaQ4 had a clock speed of 450 MHz. Cobalt made ​​a RaQ2 with a 250MHz RM5231 microprocessor RaQ5 with 1 GHz and Sun Cobalt RaQ XTR.

The market of dedicated servers was the largest market for Cobalt Networks. Cobalt rack was and is an independent server company that had bought hundreds of servers from Cobalt Networks. Many other hosters and ISPs bought Cobalt Networks server. The servers themselves were often referred to by the staff of this hoster because of their size, shape and color as " blue pizza boxes ".

System administrator could Cobalt systems through a small LCD screen in the center of the device and four buttons to the right use of it.

Although the product line was discontinued after three years by Sun, cobalt server had lasting impact on the market. It was at that time the most successful server appliance on the market and the success resulted in the founding of the blade server pioneer RLX Technologies, which was later bought by Hewlett -Packard. Cobalt engineers also helped to build Sun's current presence in the x86 market by Sun's first x86 server, the LX50 developed, and further development and marketing resources available to put that resulted later in Sun Server Sun Fire V60x and V65x.