OVH USA Alpha Servers

A couple of weeks back I was given an Alpha Server for testing by OVH US who are well established in Europe and are starting a new data center in North America.

The Manager back-end is very simple and makes re-installs / re-boots a breeze. They provide a choice of OS images if you want to re-install: Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD & Linux. Choosing Linux provides a plethora of options, notable among them is Linux Hadoop Cloudera CDH3 "pseudo-distributed"

Here are the server specs:

Part	Spec
Processor	Intel Core i3 2130 2x2(HT)x3.4+ GHz
Architecture	64 bit
RAM	16 GB DDR3
HDD	2 x 1 TB - SATA2
RAID	SOFT - 0/1
NIC	FastEthernet

So far the network speed has been very good, but the Hadoop image had a very basic thing missing - JAVA_HOME and HADOOP_HOME had not been setup in the default shell.
Also, this image did not contain Mahout which had then to be downloaded and installed separately. But then again these are just Alpha servers and such simple problems are to be expected.