Putting together all the pieces ...

So all the peices are there, well the main components anyway,

The application idea
The working space
The people (Garage BA, Garage CEO and Datacenter Hitman)
(and most importantly) The drive and motivation to finish the project

Once all the main ingredients are there the aim of the game is to combine it all to produce your solution and most importantly to keep the momentum going and drive throughout.

The development of the solution began with discussing the business model and the functionality of the application. The initial framework and functionality of the application was discussed by myself (Garage CEO) and my first partner (Garage BA). We looked at the different functions that could be implemented into the application that would make it unique and different to all other similar applications currently out in the market.

This process took about 3 weeks in total and the output of this was some business process flows along with some initial designs of what the user interface would look like. The detail of the documents was not very deep but as we were going to develop it ourselves we knew what we wanted to do in detail so we used the business process flow documents just as a guideline during the development. I created the user interface documents so that when designing the initial cut of the user interface i had a rough of idea what it would look like to prevent me from designing it as i was developing.

A parallel activity to the development of the business process flows of the application and the user interface design was the procurement of hardware. The idea was that we would have redundancy and decent processing power at a total cost of below $1000 dollars. I along with Datacenter hitman embarked on this journey of purchasing low cost hardware and equipment. Let me outline what we run today as an initial setup. The journey of how we procured this hardware will be done in detail as the story progresses as it is a story on its own however below is the outline of what we are now currently running.

Server equipment
- Compaq proliant G2 ML350 x 2 (dual 1.4 ghz + 2 gig of ram)
- Compaq proliant G2 ML370 x 2 (dual 1.4 ghz + 2 gig of ram)
- Compaq proliant 6400 x 4 (quad 700mhz Xeon + 4 gigs of ram)
- Dell poweredge 2550 x 2 (dual 1.1 ghz + 1 gig ram)
- Dell GX270 desktops x 10 (1.8 ghz + 512 gig ram)
- Compaq proliant ML 570 ( quad 700mhz Xeon + 2 gigs of ram)

Network equipment
- Cisco 5000 series switch
- 3com superstack switch
- baynetworks stackable switch
- Cisco 877 m k9 router

Misc equipment
- Compaq 9000 rack x 2

Equipment thrown out after either getting them for free or purchasing at low cost
- IBM x340 eServer x 2 (didnt work as had faulty mother boards)
- Compaq Alpha upright server ( had no memory etc etc)

Of this equipment the described above the first set of servers that were bought was the ML350's. They are great servers and dont have any problems even until now. Very easy to configure and setup and also to maintain. Datacenter hitman had the role of checking all the equipment and making sure that there were not faulty components and if everything checked out alright, to install the required operating system.

Both the activites progressed in parallel and as Garage CEO i was across both the activities. I would schedule my time as follows to ensure that i could cover both parts.

Weekdays:
During the week days I would come home from work and develop the application, (in the early stages) either on business processes or the user interface design. I would get home at about 6:00pm from work, have a shower, eat then begin coding

Weekends:
I would get up at about 6:00am in the morning, have breakfast, have a shower then begin coding until about 12:00 in the afternoon. Garage hitman would usually arrive at about 12:00 - 1:00 so at that point in time we would begin on the hardware configuration.

It was a great setup and things would get done and progress smoothly. Setting up hardware can be an exciting job but when installing the OS it gets down right boring ... however we are resourceful guys and we would do different things to pass the time ....