It was a flashy looking Fujitsu-Siemens Server, with LSI Megaraid and other tasty bits of hardware. I couldn't be bothered to rootle through the manuals.

Within 20 minutes I'd configured the 4 mini-160GB drives into a RAID array with one hot spare, installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 in an LVM Virtual Volume, installed MySQL server and rebooted.

The whole thing just worked. Another 10 mins and it was populated with data.

Fabulous.