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Here's a nifty interview of RJ of last.fm by Tom Corelis. Tom asked all the questions that I would have asked. Good job Tom. Here's what RJ had to say about Sun Hardware:

A few years ago we were buying from a local supplier here, and over the years it became more important to us to get really power efficient equipment, because at the data centers in London and the UK power is a real premium; it was hard to get enough power. So we started looking around for machines that were more tailored to low-powered stuff. So we have a mix of different suppliers but right now we’re buying quite a lot from Sun. We just got some new low-power blades that we’ve put in to do web serving, and our main database – with which we use PostgreSQL – is also on Sun hardware, for example. So yeah, we’ve been getting some good stuff from them. Sun seems to make a good range of servers that are quite conscious on the power requirements, and are quite good about giving you the spec about how much power they’re going to draw.

And Java

We actually do a lot of our storage and processing in Hadoop, which is a framework based on a paper that Google released on the same subject. So, that’s actually a distributed computing framework written in Java.