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.