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How much for a decent Sparc Box?

N

NaturalChiller

Senior member
I'm interested in purchasing a sparc box. I don't really know much about them. I was wondering what SUN machines are decent and what I would have to pay for it. I'm interested in setting up a webserver and being able to tinker around with the sun box.

TIA
 
Why don't you just go to their website? Basically they start around $995 and go up to $3 million (base model). Once you choose the base model, have fun with the options.

Of course a $500 AMD machine will beat most of what you could afford there...
 
Well, the newer the more expensive (and the price tends to ramp quickly). I've been looking ob egay to pick one up and this is what i've seen:
Sparc5,10,20 - ~$100 to $200 based on ram, hd (if at all) and Mhz
UltraSparc 1 - ~$250

The dual processor machines seem to be quite the desired item and go over $350 quite rapidly.
 


<< why are they so pricey? >>



Special processor = lots of research costs.

Special processor = few customers.

Result: To make a profit you must charge quite a lot per processor.
 


<< why are they so pricey? >>



Proprietary hardware. Sun is really the only one making Sparc/US hardware, so they can charge whatever the market will bear. They have an image of stability with their Solaris operating system, and a lot of people buy into that.
 


<<

<< why are they so pricey? >>



Proprietary hardware. Sun is really the only one making Sparc/US hardware, so they can charge whatever the market will bear. They have an image of stability with their Solaris operating system, and a lot of people buy into that. >>



thanks.
 
if you want a sparc pizza box, i suggest you head over to ebay and try your luck there. you can technically run solaris 8 on a sparcstation 5 (not sure you wanna).

if you have the money, i suggest you get a sunblade 100. they run ~1000 or so.

are you using this to learn solaris? sun distributes an x86 version as well, although there are some differences and the hardware it supports is REAL OLD stuff. i know that you need to have an ATI card and an SB16 (i believe) for video and sound to work, else it'll be ugly. there is a company on the net that wrote drivers for other manufacturers, but of course you'll need to pay for that.

write back if you need more information.

edit: you want to run a webserver... sorry, didn't catch that when i first read it. get youself a cheap sparc5, 10, or 20 to learn. the only problem that i can forsee is that you will need a monitor (they are proprietary) to first set it up. after that, you can use xterm on your PC to administer it. i know the sunblades will work using the standard 15 pin monitor cables from PCs.
 
just $4,329,489.00 for the base option with all the bells and whistles here. remember to multiply that by 2 since you probably want to make them redundant. whoaaa.... that's one pretty penny! 😀
 


<< why are they so pricey? >>


I don't think $2000 for an entry-level server is all that pricey, but that's just me.

Define "decent."
I mean, are you just hacking around, or is this actually going to be a piece of production equipment? If you just want a box to beat upon and learn to operate, you can get a SparcStation 10 or 20 for about $100-$500 depending on what you get. I paid about $200 total for my SS10 with 4x55MHz UltraSparcs and 112MB RAM. It cranks out pretty solid, but I wouldn't use that little monkey to run a business critical website.

If you need something production-strong, save your pennies for something more powerfu.
 
My Dad used to work at Sun before he got fired :disgust: and he said the best thing would be one of the Sun Blade machines. You can run Solaris 8 on that easily.
 
i agree with with jzero said about 2000$ not being a whole lot for an entry level workgroup server...

also, if you want to run windows and stuff on a sun box, you can opt to get a Sun PCI 1 or 2 card and run PC apps on your sun box. They are priced about 150 and 400, repectively.
 
dont listen to people that have no experience with sun harware. 32 bit sparcs make great servers, i currently own two of em. I dont use solaris though, redhat 6 fits my purpose lot better.

Anyhoo i have one sparc 10 for sale here
 
Thanks for the input...i'm going to watch eBay for a sub $1000 system.

by sub $1000, i mean i'm willing to shell out a few hundred to get a machine to "beat on" as someone quite eloquently put it. I guess maybe a sparc5 or something.
 
whoa... for 1k, get a sunblade 100. you shouldn't need to pay more than 200 (or so) for a sparc5, depending on configuration of course...

get a sunblade, you won't regret it. 🙂 and you can download solaris from sun (hopefully you have a fast connection).
 
Sorry for the confusion,,,but spending a 1000 bucks is a little bit of a pipedream. Will I be able to learn from a sparc 5? If so, a couple hundred bucks sounds better than dropping a cool grand for something which I'm not sure is completely necessary. I guess I should have said that I really would like to learn from the box and that I'm on a budget. Thanks
 


<< Sorry for the confusion,,,but spending a 1000 bucks is a little bit of a pipedream. Will I be able to learn from a sparc 5? If so, a couple hundred bucks sounds better than dropping a cool grand for something which I'm not sure is completely necessary. I guess I should have said that I really would like to learn from the box and that I'm on a budget. Thanks >>


Although if you're just looking to learn Solaris, you could get an Intel build of Solaris.
The hardware you'll find on a Sparc 5/10/20 will be outdated (no sBus, etc)
If you're just looking to learn Solaris or Unix in general, you could try to dig up the intel build of Solaris or put linux on an old PC and a-learning you will go 🙂
 
again, what jzero said.

get an intel box with 128M RAM, P2 processor, ATI video card, SB16 card and you're on your way for solaris. maybe you have an older system that'll suffice.
 
if you want a RISC processor based box, you can also look at SGI, and HP machines. IMO they look much nicer than the older SparcStations, however the new blades look sweet.
 
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