California Digital Offers VA-designed Servers

The company is in Fremont, California,
they make 1U and 2U Linux servers, and their phone number is
888-LINUX-4-U. VA Linux Systems? No, it's
California Digital
Corporation, which recently acquired the rights to
manufacture VA's server designs, along with a sublease on part of
VA's building. "There's a pent-up demand from people who were
looking for VA systems", said CEO B.J. Arun, who started California
Digital in 1994.Douglas Bone, formerly of VA, is California Digital's new
chief operating officer and will manage the sales force.Can a small company compete now that large vendors have
entered the Linux server industry? Yes, according to one Linux
hardware industry executive. "If you provide impeccable service and
take care of your customers, they will reward you with loyalty,
which translates into success long-term", he said. "There is no
substitute for service at a personal level, and there is absolutely
no way that Compaq, Dell or IBM will be able to deliver
that."California Digital was founded in 1994 in California, and
Arun said it has been profitable for 28 consecutive quarters. Until
the year 2000, he said, "we primarily focused on very high-end x86
hardware. We were an authorized Tyan distributor."That changed last year when the company started a
high-performance computing professional services group that focused
on Linux clusters. At a development center in India, Arun said, the
company employs MDs, PhDs in bioinformatics, and experts in oil and
gas, weather modeling, and graphics rendering. The India operation
is California Digital (India) Private Limited, a wholly owned
subsidiary.CDC's top-of-the-line server is the dual Athlon 1240, built
around the Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard. The company also offers
servers with one or two Intel CPUs, a SCSI storage enclosure and
preracked, preconfigured clusters with networking hardware. Two
distributions, Red Hat and Debian, are available."We're a smaller company than VA was, so there will be less
overhead. We'll be able to price things a little more aggressively,
but we're not in this business to be a low-price vendor where you
sacrifice customer support," Bone said.California Digital is currently doing all manufacturing
in-house, Bone said, though he didn't rule out the possibility of
outsourcing some future manufacturing. The company is using the
Cerberus Test
Control System, originally developed at VA, to test its
systems before shipment.Total staff numbers about 40. "We're being very careful about
concentrating on profitably growing our company. As the company
grows, we have a list of referrals of people who used to work at
VA", Arun said.Relations with the neighbors are good. "VA has actually been
very supportive in this whole process", Arun said.Don Marti is Technical
Editor of Linux Journal.

email: dmarti@ssc.com