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.