Last week I submitted a
try and buy request to Sun for some equipment to us on some research
projects at school. In particular, I’m excited about using it to scan the
network for spyware. I was a little worried that my information was not
processed properly as I got a brief error message upon submission of the
request. No problem, email my
personal Sun representive (aka my brother), and see what’s going on.
After a few messages were passed around, I got an phone call from Sun today
about the project.
As I thought, the machines are way backed up because of the massive response
to their admittedly very cool offer. I explained our situation to their
educational sales person for the Pittsburgh area (note to Sun web folks, I
could not easily find this information on your web site. Instead Phil had to
contact the sales person for the University of Minnesota who forwarded my
information to the nice person here in Pittsburgh) and she seemed quite
receptive and reassured me that Sun was processing the stuff and that our
purpose seemed pretty novel and interesting. So, we’re still in the queue,
but it should be all good from here.
She could have just left it at that, but she didn’t. She also was helpful
enough to provide us information about Sun matching grants for hardware. This
drops the price of a 4 core box down to a more reasonable $3800 or so. Pretty
nice. However, we still don’t have that much money, at least not yet. Anyway,
if this can run on $3800 hardware, I’d think that it makes things a whole lot
more attractive for doing some sustained testing on the system. We’ll just have
to see how well everything actually runs on it.
Once this thing shows up I’ll be sure to blog some more and provide some
photos of the system along with preliminary benchmarks.