Sun to Give Niagara Servers to Reviewers

abdulzis writes "Sun Micro's Jonathan Schwartz says that Sun is giving away free servers to bloggers who do a good job reviewing their servers. From the blog article: 'if you write a blog that fairly assesses the machine's performance (positively or negatively), send us a pointer, we're likely to let you keep the machine'" Mr. Schwartz, if you're reading this, feel free to send us one with "Attn: CowboyNeal" on the label.

Comments

Obviously no enterprise experience

[Fished]

Obviously, you've never been a sysadmin in an enterprise environment. First of all, I don't give a shit what kind of audio or video card a server has. In fact, if it's my server, it doesn't even have a monitor or speakers. Instead, it has a serial cable plugged into a terminal server, and that's all. All your fancy video card does is burn power and make heat that I have to spend money to pump out of the rack.

The difference between a server and a PC is:

1. A server is designed to serve data, and has nothing I don't need for it. That means that that damn video card that's not even hooked to a monitor can't break and take my website down with it's million dollars a day revenue.
2. A server is designed to serve data reliably, and has enterprise class components. That means no cheap-ass western digital hard drives. If you don't think there's a difference, you've never used Enterprise hardware.
3. A server is designed to serve data cheaply. This means low TCO, not low purchase price. Which means an OS that pushes the most bits per cpu, while requiring the least system administrator time. Is Solaris that OS? Debatable, since time has ensured that Apache is highly optimized for Linux. But if you can't run Linux on these yet, you will be able to soon. However, the CPU architecture on these is pretty highly parallel, and Solaris may work better than Linux. Sun is presenting some impressive numbers for these. And they're cheap (as servers go).

In other words, this may be a good time to buy SUNW, at least if you can grow a beard.

Re:Obviously no enterprise experience

[King_TJ]

Yeah, I basically agree - although what are these "enterprise class" hard drives you refer to? Last time I checked, companies like Sun were charging outrageous prices for hard drives that were just your run-of-the-mill Seagate SCSI's in proprietary hot-swap trays.

Sure, you wouldn't build an "enterprise server" with SATA just yet, but I'd say some form of SATA2 (or who knows, maybe SATA3?) will be the future replacement for SCSI. The hard drive makers are consolidating and IMHO, will soon reach a point where everything is either "budget priced" (EG. junk, suitable for PC resellers to use in low-cost systems for consumers and so-ho settings), or "better quality" which is used for everything from the largest enterprise systems to hobbyist PC's built with performance and quality parts in mind.

Right now, you pay a ridiculous premium for all things SCSI, simply because it's a dying standard, only used and respected by those building large servers for people with deep enough pockets to pay the prices without question. SCSI has disadvantages though, including the difficulty in making the high-density cables and connectors. (Ever try crimping a connector onto a SCA-80 cable, for example?)

The drives themselves tend to be built from pretty much the same parts as their SATA counterparts, lately. They can just stick a different type of controler board on the bottom and call it SATA vs. SCSI. We're no longer in the era where companies like Micropolis and Fujitsu built obviously better-constructed and better warrantied drives intended for server use only.