Second Hand Sun Servers

ToxicPaddy

Just a quick question here and curious to know the answer.

Is there much of a market for second hand Sun servers out there?

I know they come with a fairly hefty price tag and compared to Intel/AMD based servers, which rarely hold their value, they seem to be up for sale on Ebay etc, but do companies actually invest in them or do they prefer to take the leap and purchase new??

Tox

Static M.e.

I would never buy second servers, SUN or otherwise.

Why would I ever take a chance on a second hand server for Production. The only time where it might make sense is for demo kit.

ToxicPaddy

Yeah thats what I was wondering. I know with the current climate, some smaller companies are restricting their spending.

A mate and former colleague of mine was asking me the other day about it and saying he saw this sun server and that sun server online, refurbished models etc.

My advice was if you're buying refurbished buy if from a reputable official sun dealer and buy a maintenance contract for them too.

The company he works for are small and even in the good times never has a decent IT budget so why now they are deciding to spend is beyond me. Maybe the person signing the checks thinks there are some bargins to be had..

BaconZombie

I know the $Company I work for have bought 2nd hand SUN hardware, but mainly for parts to keep some legacy system alive until they are migrated to new hardware.

But this was only because they could not get the parts new / refurbished.

On a side note ; if you happy to not make any $$$ from them, I've you thought of donating them to a Local Hackerspace ?

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

ToxicPaddy

Oh I dont have any to sell, I was just asking on here and decided to go looking on ebay etc.. (would be nice to have a few hanging around alright )

I know second hand intel and amd based servers change hands frequently as parts are fairly reasonable and they can be refurbed for a much lower cost but was just curious about Sun servers..

Capt'n Midnight

Have you taken Moores law in to account ? (Depreciate 50% every 18 months)
Have you taken the "5 year" desigh life of hard drives into account ? ( Depreciate 20% every year)

For a server you might want to factor in €150 per year per 100W extra power it uses over a newer model - more if you have to run air con as well


Does it still compare to a new entry level servers in terms of price / performance / expected working life ?

gerryk

From a power consumption POV, it wouldn't really be worthwhile. If you just want to play with Solaris, go for OpenSolaris, which is available for x86_64 or i386 hardware.

For production use, the licensing costs alone would be a pretty big barrier. You can get a shedload of RHEL licenses for the price of a single CPU Solaris license.

ToxicPaddy

Oh I agree.. licensing costs for Sun servers and the Solaris OS are crazy.

The company I work for moved everything from Sun Solaris on Sun servers to Linux on Intel based systems and saved a small fortune.

Capt'n Midnight

ToxicPaddy wrote: »

Oh I agree.. licensing costs for Sun servers and the Solaris OS are crazy.

Even M$ only charge one license per chip no matter how many cores it has.

BTW
was a link on theregister recently about a 100 core chip released released recently , and of course you can have many of them
at 55W it's less than half the power of some of the most excessive of intel's P4's

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/10/tilera_tilegx_8000_chips/

The Tile-Gx design has a mesh network linking all of the cores together as well as linking the 256KB L2 caches per core into a single coherent L3 cache. Each core also has 32KB of L1 data cache and 32KB of L1 instruction cache. So on the 100-core variant of the chip, there is 32MB of total cache for the data to frolic within. It is widely believed that the Tilera cores are based on a licensed version of the MIPS core, with the third-generation Tile-Gx chips sporting 64-bit processing but only 40-bit memory addressing, Bailey revealed to El Reg. That means the top-end part can address up to 1TB of DDR3 main memory, and interestingly, the Tilera processors will be able to run that memory faster than their cores, unlike most other processors.

The Tile-Gx chips also have additional SIMD instructions that make use of a four multiplier-accumulator (MAC) per cycle unit that can deliver 600 billion MACs per second, which Tilera says is 12 times the fastest digital signal processor on the market when the design was launched in late 2009. The chips also have two MiCA engines, short for Multistream iMesh Crypto Acelerators, and are able to deliver 40 Gb/sec of bandwidth on cryptographic work and 20 Gb/sec on compression and decompression jobs.

gerryk

That's nothing. My GPU has 1440 cores.