Brand new sun ultra 10 ?

You don't.

Sun hasn't shipped any new Ultra-10 systems since November 2002.They stopped manufacturing them in August 2002.

Every one of them that still exists will be a used or refurbished system, no matter what a seller may advertise.

There are many available from the usual used equipment channels and from the various online auction sites.

Bill at 2007-7-5 17:57:13 >

Only seen a few Ultra 3's from some of the sales guys and they do look nice.

But for the Ultra 20, there is alot to be said for a multi platform Sun desktop that is between 500 and 1600 new depending on specification.

Besides, we are cross training industry now, lol, :-)

stumoor at 2007-7-5 17:57:13 >

I haven't had a chance to get an Ultra 3 yet, I had a very enthusiastic customer interested in the US IIi, but when I quoted the US entry price he wasn't interested anymore. The price is too high compared with the entry power book G4 systems he told me.

I think the Ultra 20 is a great system ( though I am a big SPARC fan! ), from a business perspective the Ultra 20 has to be a winner for Sun. I have many small business customers that are using Dell/IBM tower servers running Linux. Dell and IBM are offering basically the same systems for 1000USD and offers of 3000USD SPARC workstations ( Blade 1500 ) are always dismissed with the comment like "it's too expensive for what we want to use it for" meaning it's going to run samba and postfix for a work group of 10 - 20 PCs. I think the Ultra 20 will challenge the IBM/Dell systems as an entry level tower server. The Ultra 20 looks good too, it kind of reminds me of the Ultra 10/30/60 chassis. I would love to see a return of a single and dual Ultra x0 SPARC based system with a 1000 - 2000 dollar price tag and a similar chassis to the Ultra 20, something like the Powermac G5, now that would be something I would call sexy!

mlennon at 2007-7-5 17:57:13 >

I agree with that point on the Ultra 3 Stuart , someone that may be traveling around a big city performing maintenance on Sun servers might get good value from using a mobile UNIX workstation, yourself or Brian perhaps?

I got my hands on an Ultra 20 today, though the system is a very " generic " PC type of system, I think it is refreshing to have a low cost, pre configured UNIX workstation on the market. Despite many ravings about Linux, there aren't many boxes that are ready to go out of the crate. I have spent 2 years working exclusively with Linux based installations and 90% of the time I would have major time loss because of basic configuration issues. From a maintenance point, I think this package will work really well too, having centralized support through Sun Solve for both Solaris and the hardware is perfect, for someone like me this eliminates the need to call support for anything other than FRU/CRU orders. I have found that it is a nightmare trying to maintain systems that have software and hardware support through two separate channels ( Red Hat and Dell for example ), though attempts have been made by some manufacturers to provide Linux support, generally the support personel are very inexperienced with Linux ( MCPs most of the time! ).

mlennon at 2007-7-5 17:57:13 >

If you want to save money and get decent box get Blade 100, 500 Mhz and easily you can overclock it to 550MHz (10% CPU speed increase for free!!!) Close pins 1-2 on JP3 on mobo (by default they are all open on 500Mhz models) and you are in business. If you are lucky you maybe able to get to 600Mhz, but I am not sure how stable it would be.

I just got one blade 100 from ebay for $100 and it came also with SUN PCI IIpro (celeron 733Mhz and 128MB of RAM) so I'll install linux there. Can't beat the price, 2 computers in one for $100 and 10% free CPU speed increase on top of that. Thank you SUN!!!

dnd108 at 2007-7-5 17:57:13 >