SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill has amazing hardware reviews on his blog. If you’re looking for very candid feedback on how server vendors stack up at a growing Web 2.0 company, you need to read these posts.

According to MacAskill, Sun’s hardware engineering is awesome, but the sales cycle still sucks. Sounds familiar.

Here are the greatest hits:
SmugMug review of the SunFire x2200 M2 server: Two months after SmugMug dumped Rackable for Sun, MacAskill says he’s still starry-eyed in love. Pie in the sky, he’d like to see dual power supplies, DC-power servers and a liquid cooling option.

x86-64 Server vendor bakeoff: Server vendors vie for SmugMug’s newly minted Web 2.0 dollars. HP doesn’t fit the bill, passes them off to a VAR; Dell is quick on the draw but not paying attention to what they actually asked for; IBM doesn’t return phone calls (Tell me about it!); Rackable is “cheap in every sense of the word” and its once “cool” server business is in some sort of freefall. And the winner by default: Sun.

SmugMug details Amazon’s S3 performance flaws: Amazon’s storage offering, S3 had some major issues according to MacAskill. “Customers were at our gates with pitchforks and torches. Our paying customers were affected and they could tell there was something wrong. Not good.” SearchStorage.com also reported on customer problems with S3.

A review of Sun’s T1000: Why SmugMug didn’t go with Sun’s T1000 server.