Dude, you’re not getting a Dell.

Despite the recent pot-banging around the Sun/Oracle merger and the allegations that Sun’s getting it’s customer base stolen out from under it, I just pushed the button on a fairly large cluster with Sun as the hardware vendor.

Simply put, I couldn’t find machines with better stats for the money. Even with the academic matching grant program tabled for now, we STILL got amazing promotional pricing on the x4150. I can’t even find anything that can compare to an x4250 for on-board storage — 16 on-board drives. Dell’s MD1000 chassis supports only .. 15 drives. There’s no better hardware to run Solaris on. The Sun ILOM support is leagues better than Dell’s DRAC or even HP’s ILO. All the machines come with at least four on-board ethernet ports. The storage array options are also superior. No one else sells a 24 slot SATA chassis with hot-swap drives backed with three controllers.

Simply put, the Sun option was the fastest, most scalable option. The hardware is put together well, with the same sort of build quality you’ve come to expect from HP… far superior to Dell or IBM. And the management and tuning options are awesome. I’m really, really excited to see the hardware racked in a few weeks. They also maintain and stock a parts “locker”/cache on our campus so that a technician has access to all the parts they might need for our systems without having to courier them or drive for them.

Am I concerned about Sun going away? Not now that they’ve been bought by Oracle. They’ve got so many compelling offerings, and I hope that IW and other tech rags stop trashing Sun — I’m a fanboy from here on out.