[geeks] Disturbing Sun articles

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 09:55:49AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> Before I went there, I weighed the options of a modern UltraSPARC t1-based
> system and an IBM p520.  The p520, in retrospect, may have been a better
> purchase, even if it'd cost almost 50% more (not including what it
> would've cost to add the 3TB of storage the PC has), since poor[0]
> hardware choices leave me running everything in one shared FreeBSD
> environment, which is NOT what I wanted.  The p520 I priced could've
> easily run enough AIX LPARs to support my services.  

Is AIX at all able to use non-IBM storage controllers or networking like
Solaris is?
 
> The Sun option quickly invalidated itself.  Sun doesn't ship the t1 in a
> reasonably-priced system that runs below 60dB, so I wouldn't be able to
> run it in the part of the house I actually live in, thus negating most of
> the power savings, as I'd have to keep the computer room cool for a 1U
> system that I'd still likely be able to hear in the rest of the house.

What configuration would run below 60dB?  I would have thought that in
this case more expensive and louder would have gone together.