I would like to experiment with Solaris. I was thinking of buying either a Blade 1000 or an Ultra 80. They're almost the same price on Ebay. Could someone please say something about those two machines, e.g. pros and cons?

I would go for a Sun Blade 1000, but I'd really make my choice depending on what is actually installed in the box (CPU count and speed, RAM size, DVD vs CD, Disk size, ...)

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub.../U80/spec.html
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub...1000/spec.html

Thank you, jlliagre. I was looking at the ones hereand here.

If you want to save money, you can always go with a cheaper solution. If you buy an ultra 60 for instance, you can find them for less than $100 in ebay. They can have up to 2 cpus and more than 1 gb of ram, two internal drives. I have yet to see an ultra 80 for less than $600 so although I like the ultra80 and sun blades better (faster procs), it really depends what you are going to use them for.

I have a few ultra 60s in our lab and they are rock solid. My processors are 450 mhz. Good enough for testing. How much are you thinking about spending? You could save about $500 in the system and spend that extra money in a disk array (ex. d1000). It's a scsi jbod (just a bunch of disks) and with that, you can play with solaris volume manager and all it's raid levels.

If money is not an issue, then go with the blade 1000s or newer.

Thanks, apt-get-dude. I am willing to spend $1000-2000, since eventually I might put it into production to replace an old 450 MHz, 384 MB RAM slackware server.

[edit] I'm also considering your Ultra 60 + disk array idea. Would I need any extra hardware on the Ultra 60 to support the array?

It depends. If you get a d1000/a1000, then you will need a scsi card. If you get an a5200/t3/t3b, then you need a fiber hba (qlogic 2100/2200).

There are newer disk arrays but those will cost you more $

ok, thanks for the useful info.