Free servers?

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

March 2, 2006

So Sun’s giving away T2000 servers for free.

Well sort of, anyway: you get to try ‘em for 60 days, and according to Jonathan Schwartz if you post benchmarks of the thing’s performance, the sales department “might” let you keep the thing.

Sounds too good to be true, eh? Well, I’m certainly not going to pass up the chance to fiddle with an quad-core, $8,000 server for a few months, so I filled out the form. If I actually get one, I’ll run some benchmarks of the Django stack and see how it performs.

It’s entirely unclear from Schwartz’s post exactly how I’m supposed to apply to keep the thing for free, and there’s not really any details of the promotion on Sun’s site. If they’re serious about letting people get these things for free, they’re really doing a bad job. The whole process looks and smells like a scam; like one of those slimy try-before-you-buy-but-not-really car salesman tactics.

Still… I get to poke at an $8,000 server for a few weeks, so how can I say no?

Stay tuned and we’ll see how this this goes.

Comments:

Mike:

Hell yeah. I want one too. I'll run benchmarks on my buggy apps. They bring any super machine to its knee.

Mike:

I just received confirmation that sun is shipping it to me. Exciting!

Mike:

Total of 4 servers is to be given away. I'll post my benchmarks, but realize the chances are low:
http://www.sun.com/servers/...

Jacob:

Reading the rules makes it sound there's going to be nine servers given away, actually... I'm not holding my breath, of course; I'm just excited to play with a $8k piece of hardware for a few months :)

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