Sumo Computer was formed on the basis that there will always be a market for a powerful computer that is both low power and in a small package. We first started out with the Kruo Box from Revolution. It was the ideal platform for computer room applications that needed a headless server. We placed a high capacity disk drive in the Kuro Box and added Gentoo Linux and sold this small and powerful computer on the internet for a few hundred dollars.

We met with limit success in the marketing of the computer, but ended up with a very happy customer base. Sumo Computer configured the headless server with the clients information so that it was simply plug and play with their network. Gentoo Linux provided an excellent  platform for the Kuro Box. With over 10,000 applications that would run on the PPC Kuro box is was a spectacular computer system.

The Kuro Box was comming up short and Sumo Computer was being bootstrapped from the proceeds of a part time consulting business.

To remedy these problems, Sumo Computer is looking for seed capital in the amount of a line of credit for 2 million dollars. 

The Jonidan project is the development of a replacement for the Kuro Box. The idea is to keep the project 100% Open. The motherboard schematic and board layout will be made public with a few caviots. The computer will be 100% Gentoo Linux compliant. Sumo COmputer will provide a Gentoo Linux feed that will support the new Jonidan project computer.

The preliminary specifications for the Jonidan motherboard are as follows.

• 2 STI Cell BE chips operationg at 3.2 Ghz.
• 16 Gb of XDR memory.
• 4 10/100/1000/10000 Ethernet ports.
• 1 RapidIO port for clustering.
• 5 port SATA II disk controller.
• 5 128 Gb SSD Disks in a Raid 6 disk array.

 The base computer will install into a single computer enclosure that will provide power and cooling. Due to it's low power requirements and very high performance and small size it will meet the overall goals set down by the Sumo Computer founders.

Solid State disks are becomming cheaper and more functional than ever before. The SSD has a faster access time and read time than a regular hard disk. The SSD are inferior to hard disks in the speed of writing data to them, but this can be overcome by rewritting the low level routins to take advantage of the SSD write characteristics to improve the data write performance of the SSD to that of the hard disk dirve.

SSD disk drives are more reliable, have wider operational temperature ranges and can sustain higher operation shock that a regular hard disk drive. By placing the SSD disks in a RAID 6 configuration two of the 5 SSD disks can fail without losing any operational integrity. This would allow a failed disk to be returned to Sumo Computer for replacement without completely compromising the disk array integrity.

Within the next 18 months new FLASH memory technologies will provide SSD disk drives with greater capacity and higher speeds than today.  

The proper way to fund this sort of computer company is with venture capital. To begin with seed money in the amount of two million dollars will be needed to develop the computer system and port the software to the new computer. Then 50 production units will need to be produced for testing and pre-marketing reviews. Then a presentation for the first tier of venture capital will need to be prepared. Part of this presentation will be the demonstration ofconsumer applications that will provide a marketplace for more than 5,000 computer systems well suited to the Jonidan project.

 The first tier of venture capital will be need to provide funding for building 5,000 production units. The current target MSRP for the Jonidan project is $7,000.00.

Sumo Computer will need to provide technical support as well as consulting and training. The training will be in the form of 1 hour training videos that can be downloaded for $35.00 each.

Technical support will be provided by opening the support of the Jonidan project to the world community. Individuals with an LPI certification and working as a current Gentoo developer will be recruited for providing technical support on a fee basis. The recruited individuals will be given a debit Visa card for receipt of payment. Each issue on our product defect list that is resolved with return a payment to the individual effecting the fix. The fix must be submitted to the Gentoo QA/QC team and accepted as a fix before payment is effected.

Hardware support will be provided by overnight express or door to door courier. Due to the high reliability of the components in the computer, reliability should approach 50,000 MTTF.

Additional income will be made by hardware/software maintenance contraxts, training revenue and consulting income.