Sun to give free hardware
I can't believe nobody else has blogged about this yet ;)
So, Jonathan Schwartz's blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan) has quite a bit of information about this. Basically you can apply to receive a free trial T2000 server for 60 days worth of testing. At that time you're expected to buy it, or return it. Schwartz recently said that he'd let *some* people keep the T2000 if they blogged about their experience.
Many people cited difficulties getting their hands on these elusive servers. I understand.
When the trial promo first started I filled out the form in an attempt to get one of these for work. I got a call back rather quickly, but they ended up saying "no" when I indicated we didn't plan to buy a T2000. We wanted a T1000, but those aren't shipping yet. So I figured I would test out a minimally configured T2000 instead. Sun wasn't amused.
But now I want to write a review of the T2000 server. Not because of Jonathan's promise--I don't care if I can keep the server. I wrote a Solaris 10 review back when it first came out, and Sun apparently enjoyed it because they linked to it from their main S10 marketing website.
(http://www.serverwatch.com/sreviews/article.php/3455111)
So I filled out the form again, but haven't heard back at all this time. *sigh*
I've got some internal friends at Sun trying to make this happen.. but the process is excruciating (nobody knows who to ask). If you want to test one of these T2000's for your business, make sure to sound interested in buying, and don't forget "yes, I have multithreaded apps with no floating-point-heavy requirements."
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I got mine without any problems (a T2000 with 8 Gigs). I guess my story convinced them since i do a real-world test with my XML Middleware which runs in a bank which mainly uses SUN-Hardware and it has nothing todo with the typical issues (like Apache Webserver scalability, J2EE scalability) yet beeing a pure java solution with its main focus on "throughput computing". Everything was working out fine. Last week i got mine, the first tests were working and now i start tweaking and finetuning the processes/VMs/GC-ergonomics,pset bindings,....)
What really bothers me is: At first i asked a representative about a slot in one of their test-labs. I wanted to do the tests remotely, saving both me and SUN the effort to ship boxes back and forth. I also offered to go there to avoid having to use some kind of SSH/VPN stuff.
In the end i am quite happy to have it in my office, but being in the testlab might be a much more efficient solution since there should be people around which can find out bottlenecks much more quickly ... and believe me: You will definitely have to tweak alot to get the most out of it (using pset to bind processes to processors or groups thereof, choosing GC-ergonomics and so forth).
But keep trying, give them a good story and they will support you. They need to, since they need our experiences to further market the machines for a variety of scenarios.
I've blogged about this...
You said you can't believe nobody else has blogged about this, but I have (at least according to Technorati ;) :
http://www.filipdewaard.com/archives/52-Planning-to-review-the-Sun-Fire-T2000-server.html
However, I haven't heard anything from Sun yet (except from a comment from someone working at Sun in my PHP namespaces entry). Maybe they have underestimated the blogging community when it comes to free stuff...
because we knew it would be excruciating :)
Indeed, zfs makes me tingle.
I'm told there has been some talk on the LKML about implementing zfs in linux. Of course, everyone is scared of lawyers, so who knows if this will happen.
because we knew it would be excruciating :)
Anyway I think the one exciting thing to come out of Sun in dog's years is the Zettabyte file system, which is truly revolutionary and cool. If I ever get caught up, I want to play with it. At least I won't have to know who to bribe just to get hold of it. :)