Say hello to ‘Nimitz’

It’s been no secret that the computing power in our friendly server cluster has been falling behind demand. We have 30-40 users and dozens of websites being driven by a pair of 1U servers that, to their credit, are doing a bang-up job.
‘boomer’, our main server, is but a poor Sempron 2400+. It has performed beautifully for 2+ years, but during the day, it’s showing signs of needing some relief.
We added ‘guardian’ about 6 months ago to handle front end mail loads (greylisting), DNS traffic, web proxies, and basic firewall duties. It’s a single 2.4gig Xeon box, and has done a great job.
I’m now deploying several Java applications for customers to use, and I really need some more CPU/Ram to run with.

Welcome ‘nimitz’. Thanks to a long term loan from Alex, we’ll be able to put some rockin dual AMD Opteron action in place. This box will act as an application host, primarily using Tomcat to serve up CONGO installations.
As I type, it has rebooted to it’s ‘nimitz login:’ prompt, and is ready to go.
Oh, why is it called ‘nimitz’? Upon powering it up for the first time, I was nearly jolted off my seat by the sheer noise level of the machine’s 6 internal fans. When it’s running, I can hear it all the way downstairs in the kitchen (2 flights of stairs). It’s flat, noisy, and powerful. So, ‘nimitz.’