I agree with Tom. SUN should just setup a couple hundred Niagra boxes with Solaris 10 or Linux and allow people to login and check them out. That's far more efficient for both SUN and the potential customers.

Posted by sharikou on February 25, 2006 at 12:50 PM PST #

It's a shame that this promotion is not availible all over the world :-) I would love to get my hands on this server to see how it handles PHP + Mysql

Posted by Samo Fabčič on February 25, 2006 at 04:25 PM PST #

Hi Jonathan,

As for slashdot, wouldn't the wikipedia project be a good target for an "expose Sun products to Linux community" plan ?

• Show how Niagaras can handle the huge load on a top 25 frequented website.
  You were talking about highly parallel server load ? here is one, it's the more loaded F/OSS web project in the world.
• If you're targeting the Linux crowd out there, well, this is a very respected LAMP project among the Linux community . Giving them servers will show us, Linux folks, Niagara performances on real life work with our usual geeks tools (PHP, Apache and Mysql), not only the corporate/executive's favorites (like Oracle/SAP/DB2/Notes etc.). We need this kind of info.
• Wikipedians are pretty well known for neutrality and objectivity. Furthermore, the admins keep transparency at high level (raw data, like servers load, uptime, traffic, setups etc. publicly disclosed) so we'd have a good, trusted, reference for comparing Niagara with other servers. We'd see servers reliability in the long term, not only performances, we'd get a feedback about manageability for Linux sysadmins ...
• Wikipedia always need more raw power, they even did a call for fund raising last month. Helping the wikipedia would improve your karma ;).
• After free software, then free hardware, what about being known for your involvement in free knowledge ?
  If properly done (eg. significant enough help), such a fund will for sure be echoed back on Linux popular "press" (slashdot, osnews, newsforge, etc.), as were preceding significant wikipedia funds. Great exposure for sure. Or are you projecting to offer very very few Niagara for your campaign ? you didn't talked about this point.

Wikipedians don't like spreading biased info for corporate pr (look at their talks about the firsts yahoo and google help proposals). After all, their goal is objective knowledge. So this would end up with reliable benchmarks results from a real life setup. Something people will rely on more than the many blogs from random geeks assuming that they must do positive benchmarks on artificial or unreproducible or not detailed enough situations ( nice try) to get a free server from the favor of Sun marketing (that won't fool us).

In a related note, if I was a Sun marketer (what an "if" !), I would ensure that each large community driven F/OSS operating system project (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux kernel, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse) get several servers (they need more than one: for kernel/driver devs, for building stable packages updates, for building and testing betas). And that they get all the needed documentation, making it public, open, very accessible, NDA-free, extensive (from CPU wiring to RAID controller specs), developer-friendly, up-to-date, searchable, released before the hardware hit the market ... (double check this, there is a common perception about large compagny to be un-transparent, relatively to our free community standards, and therefore to have something to hide ; -- about what, getting Sun to blog was brilliant).

The worst pr you can get in our world would be to see users massively feeding mailing-lists with "hu ho, my Niag crashed yet again" just because of a poor operating system support , or no one replying to the so common "hey, does someone know if our distro run on this hardware ?": beware, those mailing-lists are permanently archived by google, you can't go back.
Or simply, people avoiding your products because the distribution they better know won't support it (this may happen to SPARC soon: there's an announcement about problems with some archs (including SPARC) to be supported on next Debian release, and an update list of archs (re)qualified for this release, this affects DCC, Debian, and Ubuntu user base, at least). Those community driven projects usually can't afford several $9000 machines, you know, but they're still stronger opinion maker than you.
Or being stroke by something like Theo de Raadt loudly calling his user base for a public campaign to get all the docs out from Sun without NDA( as he did for UltraSPARC III, for Adaptec AAC, etc.. sadly this is not a totaly random example).

Get used to this Jonathan, if you want to come to our world: there is not, as you said on a different matter "only one choice" (Red Hat), because the key here is not anymore a question of passing large deals between CEOs nor getting corporate support contracts from SAP and Oracle.
It's about dealing with a special community: very pragmatic, very chatty, not hermetic or partitioned as you may think (we are very permeable to each other, sharing many transversals point of interest), where info spreads very fast on mailing lists/wikis/blogs/news sites comments/forums (blogs are only a small part of this), where project's lead developers are the effective opinion leaders (not CEO/COOs), where quality of hardware support depends on the developers to actually have this hardware offhand (rather than corporate support contracts) etc... New rules, here.

In brief: what about having your server gifts ending in good benchmarks/exposure from the dev community AND being useful for this community ? I know, I'm dreaming, that's too much free servers, but it's so good to dream on your blog ! ;)

Wow, this was a longer comment than I expected before writing it! Thanks for allowing comments !
Cheers,
Ben

Posted by bp on February 26, 2006 at 09:33 AM PST #

Tom, it's relatively difficult to install the OS remotely. If using stock Solaris 10, your suggestion is excellent

Posted by Christopher Mahan on February 26, 2006 at 12:21 PM PST #

I will certainly apply for a Niagara for a test on my project when Lent Term ends...

Posted by Alex Lam on February 26, 2006 at 07:16 PM PST #

Jonathan: After application is completed, how long should we expect for a follow-up from your sales team? It's been a week since my application, and there has been narry a response from anyone related to Sun? I can imagine this takes a while; just wondering if this is normal?

Posted by jww on February 27, 2006 at 06:49 AM PST #

Jonathan, you convinced me. I just signed up to test out one of your Sun servers. I have been subscribed to your blog for a good while now. I had read your earlier posts, but you finally got me out the form. Why? Because I am convinced that is must be so different, so good, that you can stand up for it with an offer such as this. Of course, I also know I make just about the perfect candidate for you to hand such hardware to. I am a 4th year Computer Science co-op student at the University of Waterloo. I am a coder, artist, musician, student, and entrepreneur. Thus, I stress my systems more than most. As a student, I find it difficult to buy as much computer power as I can easily use effectively. But, I've done well thus far with powerful Windows systems. I had not really considered a Sun system to solve my evolving computing requirements. I thought it would be a good while before I'd be able to get the hardware I need now in my hands, while I have the time, space, and freedom to play. Now I am actually quite excited to see what the system can do -- or better yet, what I can do with it. Also, given that I have a moderately popular blog (www.EchoGeneration.com), you can certainly expect ongoing coverage of me playing with my new Sun equipment, comparing it to my current configuration. I would love to keep such a system for free. It would certainly give me good reason to buy Sun products in the future. Especially if I am impressed. I expect to be impressed :)

Posted by Jason Timmermans on February 27, 2006 at 04:50 PM PST #

A very good offer? Peeling back the onion, you say this is the fastest server in the world, but obviously when we take a look at price-performance, it is less advantageous than an Intel Xeon platform. Sorry, Sun, you'll have to do better than offering try and buys on a proprietary hardware/software platform when I've already standardized my data center. Adding cost and complexity to my shop is not an option.

Posted by Geoff Mitchell on February 28, 2006 at 05:13 AM PST #

Oddly enough, when trying to fill that form out, I got an error from one of your mail servers: SSA-TryBuy-WebForm@sun.com: 550 5.7.1 <SSA-TryBuy-WebForm@sun.com>... Access denied

Posted by Nicholas Melnick on February 28, 2006 at 12:02 PM PST #

I think what Jonathan is saying is not that you get the server for free if you run benchmarks, but that then Sun's marketing department will decide if you may keep the server for free. If they decide that you may not, you can either buy the server, or Sun will pay someone to pick up the server. I am reading his message correctly?

BTW, similar offers exist in the auto industry too. GM, for instance, in some cases lets you take home a car for 24 hours to try it out. Obviously, they run a credit check before handing you the keys.

Posted by Frank Sommers on February 28, 2006 at 10:51 PM PST #

james, I had that error as well, but it seems to work again now :)

Posted by Elwin v/d Meer on March 01, 2006 at 02:43 AM PST #

We would love to get one of these for the CentOS SPARC lead developer. We plan on trying to release our SPARC arch either on 4.3 or 4.4 and we would be glad to compile on a good Niagara machine. How about it :)

Posted by Johnny Hughes on March 01, 2006 at 04:56 PM PST #