for me, personally, it's perverse historical interest.
in a larger sense, it's because Oracle's support policies make the market-clearing price for used SPARC hardware very, very reasonable. The value of 3-year-old SPARC gear is essentially $1.
As a real Solaris/SPARC customer, it's cheaper to buy new than try to get a piece of used equipment into Oracle's good graces.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you finding such cheap SPARC hardware? Even 5-year old hardware still goes for thousands of dollars on the second-hand market.
He's full of crap. Any of them that are obviously in good condition go for thousands of dollars with T1 processors. Some of those without HD's, used, and in unknown condition go for several hundred. Not apples to apples, though, as no business will depend on such unknowns for mission-critical stuff that SPARC is best used for.
Interesting enough, even the AlphaServers still sell for good money on eBay. Certainly they were great servers in their day but performance is way behind. While faster Itaniums from SGI you can get for $100-200. Old hardware market isn't linear or predictable. Personally, though, I think those AlphaServers are still worth if if one understands OpenVMS clusters or PALcode. ;)
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If you don't mind me asking, I've always wondered - what do you / people use SPARC for?
Testing - per the desired hardware page: http://www.openbsd.org/want.html
"It is important to spread sparc64 around the development community, since it is the most strict platform for detecting non-portable or buggy code."
for me, personally, it's perverse historical interest.
in a larger sense, it's because Oracle's support policies make the market-clearing price for used SPARC hardware very, very reasonable. The value of 3-year-old SPARC gear is essentially $1.
As a real Solaris/SPARC customer, it's cheaper to buy new than try to get a piece of used equipment into Oracle's good graces.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you finding such cheap SPARC hardware? Even 5-year old hardware still goes for thousands of dollars on the second-hand market.
He's full of crap. Any of them that are obviously in good condition go for thousands of dollars with T1 processors. Some of those without HD's, used, and in unknown condition go for several hundred. Not apples to apples, though, as no business will depend on such unknowns for mission-critical stuff that SPARC is best used for.
Interesting enough, even the AlphaServers still sell for good money on eBay. Certainly they were great servers in their day but performance is way behind. While faster Itaniums from SGI you can get for $100-200. Old hardware market isn't linear or predictable. Personally, though, I think those AlphaServers are still worth if if one understands OpenVMS clusters or PALcode. ;)