Can you contact Sun for a demo system, I think there may be a current trial offer going, Sun call it the " try and buy ". Also I'm not sure as to why this topic would be relevant! The ideal scenario for this platform is maximum uptime, recovery can depend on the number of applications loaded by sysv init ( there could be anything from 1 to 100 application loaded at boot time, this will have a significant impact on boot time ). Some filesystem configurations ( UFS no logging and ext2 ) may need to perform a full fsck, this could add hours to the boot time depending on the size of the filesystem.
The reason I am concerned with boot times is with regards to SLAs and downtime. We would like to minimize the downtime of the system during live upgrades. We plan to do live upgrades, and reboot to the new BE. Knowing the boot time would give us a good estimate of how many of these upgrades we can do.
Again I would suggest the " try and Buy ":
http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/index.jsp
You can also click the banner on the product home page:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/
What a great way to get a feel for a multicore platform! For anyone base in Europe the offer is available through you partner/reseller, but you can contact Sun directly an they will alocate a partner to you.