Needless to say, I didn't even bother to set these up lest build a rack for them (my normal rack is both full and too short). If packaging weren't so annoying with computer servers I would've sold them long ago.
[1] The good stuff. High static pressure, high flow fans from Delta with ball-bearings, and of course only speed monitoring, no regulation. These Sun servers make for excellent magnet boards for holding papers just without using any magnets.
[1] Ironically on the back of a "CISC" architecture. What happened there was that CMOS density had gotten so high that the relative advantage of a RISC ISA (not architecture: every thing form the P6 onward looks like a pipelined RISC box on the inside) was just a pipeline stage or two and a 1% hit in the transistor budget for decode.
Still can’t. The new bottom end model (iSeries) is cheaper (sub 10k) and will last for another 10 years until a new one is needed. The place I work is buying a new one because it is hitting the end of support (damn thing was bought before 2008). No problems that lasted more than a couple of hours in all that time.
If you don't mind my asking, what tasks do your folks have the AS/400 doing nowadays?
The ES/9000's were really good machines for the time. Had IBM not raped people on those, companies might have stuck with them for a little longer. The AS/400 was priced more reasonably and people loved those. You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to a Unix workstation if you used a nuclear bomb.
As for Sun in 2001, the problem was that they were so absurdly overpriced and underpowered that commodity x86 simply blew it away. If I didn't have direct knowledge of the dysfunction that was Sun at the time, you would have thought they were taking kickbacks from Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. to limit performance. (Explanation: Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. all had very expensive software packages that were licensed per processor core per year and effectively only ran on Sparc. So, the lower the performance of the processor, the more cores you needed and the more expensive your license to Oracle, et al.)