Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Ever wonder why schools tend to have out of date computer equipment for their students? It isn't always lack of money. Often, part of the problem is vendors who try to dump outdated equipment on schools for a "bargain" price. Of course, thanks to Moore's law, selling last year's model for 30% off, when current models are 2x as fast, isn't really a bargain, is it? Especially when you have to pay to power and cool the system. At Sun, we think every student should have access to the latest hardware, so once again we are running our Education Essentials Matching Grant Program.

The Education Essentials Matching Grant Program is definitely not a program to dump outdated equipment. Qualifying educational institutions can purchase our latest, most power efficient servers like the T5120 with the latest Niagara 2 processor. The T5120, with powerful virtualization features like LDOMs and Solaris Containers is the perfect platform for teaching. A single T5120 can be divided up into dozens of LDOMs and/or Solaris Containers without paying for expensive third party virtualization software, giving each student in a class a virtual OS environment which appears like its own server, right down to being able to reboot independent of other OS images running on the server.

Want an x86 server instead, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program has servers with the latest Intel quad core Xeon processors as well as the latest AMD Opteron systems. And if you need a larger SPARC based server, the newest SPARC M4000 and M5000 servers are available too in this program. But as they say in sales, don't wait, the Education Essentials Matching Grant Program ends in June.