So where’s my T2000?
Jonathon Schwartz has posted an update to his earlier announcement that anyone could sign up for a free trial of Sun’s T2000 server. Well, I filled out the original form the night the program was announced. People from Sun marketing contacted me to confirm some stuff. I told them what I wanted to do. They were excited. A week later someone at Sun in Ottawa called me. I said “yeah, send it my way. we’ll beat the snot out of it.” I volunteered that our current interface to Sun is with a local VAR. He said, ok, “I’ll work with them and your local sales office and get a box your way ASAP”. And that’s the last I heard of it.
I really want to believe Sun is changing. But man. The execution still stinks sometimes.
Anyhow, just last week I actually followed up and left voicemails with the Sun people who contact me originally, but still nothing. The VAR never heard anything about it. For a program that’s being promoted on the front page of sun.com and via Jonathon’s blog, it seems nobody knows how to actually get the box to me. So who knows if I’ll get to try a Niagara box. On paper it looks like it ought to be great for LDAP and NFS work. But how about SSL’ed LDAP? That’s not so clear. Pure SpecWeb numbers look great. But we’re not bottlenecked serving static files anyhow — what about for running Zope and Rails and Java web apps? Our shop has a grand total of two UltraSparc based boxes. Their performance is abysmal compared to our Opteron machines (many of which are from Sun, BTW). So I’m certainly not going to order up a T2000 on a whim that it may be a great fit for some of our projects without getting some hands on first.
*finger crossed that I’m simply too impatient*
P.S. Interesting side project: I wonder how Erlang and Alice perform across Niagara’s cores?
Update:I’ve now heard from Sun and my T2000 is apparently on the way. 
Update 2: March 22nd. One month after I posted this, nearly 3 months after I first applied, and still no T2000. By comparison, two weeks ago I requested an XServe from Apple for Open Directory testing and received it 5 days later. I had never tested anything from Apple before, and currently have zero Apple kit in the server room. Hello? Sun? Anybody there?
Update 3: April 14th. Nearly another month, and even after a face-to-face meeting with Sun Canada President Andy Canham where I was told “don’t worry, we’ll get you your T2000″ there’s still no signs of it. Perhaps I’ll fill out the form again. Or since Tim Bray is here at CanadaOnRails maybe I’ll bug him. At any rate, my storage test bed I wanted to use the T2000 on for a massive genome assembly is going to become unavailable in just a couple weeks. So perhaps time has simply run out on this one.
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