{"id":739,"date":"2008-05-11T10:36:14","date_gmt":"2008-05-11T14:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/11\/big-iron\/"},"modified":"2008-05-11T10:36:14","modified_gmt":"2008-05-11T14:36:14","slug":"big-iron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/11\/big-iron\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Iron"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I keep coming across things like <a href=\"http:\/\/cgi.ebay.com\/SUN-Enterprise-4500-E4500-Server-12x400MHz-CPU-12GB-RAM_W0QQitemZ170217906587QQihZ007QQcategoryZ51215QQtcZphotoQQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem\">this eBay listing<\/a>. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it&#8217;s fiber, so you&#8217;d need a pricier switch to use it on a &#8220;normal&#8221; copper home LAN.)<\/p>\n<p>Even if you foolishly assume that a 400 MHz SPARC is no better than a 400 MHz Celeron, with <em>12<\/em> processors, this is still a net of 4.8 GHz. With a dozen processors, this is clearly best for something that&#8217;s very multi-threaded.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s one problem: these machines use SCSI disks. SCSI&#8217;s great and all, but it&#8217;s expensive, and you can be sure that, if this machine even comes with hard drives (none are listed?), they&#8217;re 9GB. So pick up one of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newegg.com\/Product\/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148295\">these<\/a>. What&#8217;s that you say? Oh, it&#8217;s ATA and won&#8217;t work with SCSI? <a href=\"http:\/\/aztekcomputers.com\/detailpage.php\/part_num\/D2450452\/manu_part\/ADAEC7726H\">No problem<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>Nowhere that I see does Sun mention whether Solaris 10 \/ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opensolaris.com\/index.html\">OpenSolaris<\/a> will run on older hardware, but I assume it will. Some Linux distros also excel at running on platforms like SPARC.<\/p>\n<p>Now the real question: how much electricity does this thing use?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it&#8217;s fiber, so you&#8217;d &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/11\/big-iron\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,10,16,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-cool-links","category-ideas","category-materialism","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}