[Suns-at-Home] Raw Power

[Zachary Brown]

Craig Dewick wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Andre van Eyssen wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007, Ben Lewis wrote:
>>
>>> Having acquired a E3500 and an Ultra 1 in the last couple of months
>>> I find myself only really switching on my Ultra 5 to actually do
>>> anything useful.
>>>
>>> The E3500 has much more power and the Ultra 1 is much quieter than
>>> the Ultra 5 but somehow it feels like my "home machine".
>>>
>>> Is there a size-power-cpu-ram-diskspace to usefulness equation that
>>> I'm not aware of?
>>
>> Yes. The more CPU, RAM, Storage and network connectivity a box has
>> the more potentially useful.
>>
>> This is an easy one to spot. The Ultra-5's CPU is far faster than the
>> Ultra-1, no doubt it has a better framebuffer and will be much
>> snappier to use.
>>
>> The E3500 takes half an hour to POST, so if you're switching machines
>> on-and-off the wait would drive you nuts.
>
> I noticed this when I set up my E450 last year - POST takes a good 10
> minutes or more depending what diag level, etc. I have it set up for.
> It's supremely quiet apart from disk noise, and it replaced about four
> small server boxes (a couple of t105's and some older systems) I had
> running in my rack with one single, relatively more energy-efficient,
> quiet, powerful system that's simple to move around when that need
> arises.
>
>> Personally, I'd try to score a SunRay thin client or two and plug 'em
>> into your 3500. The performance may surprise you.
>
> How freely available is the software, etc. to run SunRay's like that?
> Has sun closed off access to it just like they've done with SunSolve
> and access to Solaris patches, etc.?
>
> If the software is freely available, that's good as SunRay's (esp. the
> earlier ones) show up on Ebay all the time now at cheap prices.
>
> Craig.
>
Sun Ray software is freely available and I think they can even be hooked
up to linux boxes. I seem to recall a linux version of the software
available at Sun as well.

Regards,

Zac