[rescue] best rackmount Sun (used) for $1k

[Cory Bajus]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 10:47:32PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> I would *love* a decent AIX box of some sort (not a RS6K 320), but everything
> that seems to have decent performance and will run the latest AIX is beyond
> my price/size/power consumption/"usability at home" requirements. 8-(

Bill,

I'm not sure what you define as 'decent performance', but an IBM
7043-150 is capable of running the latest versions of AIX (32bit only,
however).  These systems have a single 375 MHz 604e processor, up to 1GB
of RAM, and integrated 100Mb Ethernet and UltraSCSI.  The same system in
a 2U rack-mount case is called a 7046-B50.  If you are looking for
something 64bit (but still reasonably priced) your best bet would be a
7043-260 (up to two 200MHz POWER3) or 7044-170 (single POWER3-II at
333 or 400 MHz).

I've been waiting for IBM to introduce a cheap AIX system based on the
PowerPC 970 (they've had an AIX 970 blade for a while now) and they
finally have.  The System p5 185 is about $3K for a 1 x 2.5GHz / 1GB
config and $4K for a 2 x 2.5GHz / 2GB config (which is out of the realm
of affordable for me, but still fairly competitive for IBM).


Sorry to sound like an IBM salesman (I'm not, BTW) - just wanted to let
you know what some of the options are.

Thanks,
Cory.