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Sun to Give Niagara Servers to Reviewers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can't-give-these-away dept.

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.

3 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. ahhh... dyslexia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sun to Give Nigeria Servers to Reviewers
    hello my friend! i am a humble nigerian prince with millions of dollars and have selected you to....

  2. Obviously no enterprise experience by Fished · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
    --
    "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
  3. Re:Server vs PC by ChrisGilliard · · Score: 5, Informative

    So I get a server from Sun. Does that just mean I get a fast computer with a shitty audio and video card? Limited expansion slots?

    Since this particular server is a Niagara Server, it has the Ultrasparc T1 chip. That's the big difference. This chip has 8 cores and each core can run 4 threads at the same time for a total of 32 threads of execution. So, IF you're running a web or application server, you will be able to support a LOT more users than a single core or even dual core processor for about the same price of a high end Wintel or Lintel box. Also, this chip uses a fraction of the power that a PC uses. Since servers are always on, this is a big deal for saving money in a data center. The total power consumption is about 70 watts. The Intel Chips use more than 100 watts. I don't know about expansion slots or video card actually, but if you care about that on this box, you're missing the point.

    --
    No Sigs!