I took delivery of a new Sun M4000 server along with a J4200 storage array.
Unfortunately its not mine, its for a client, but its still pretty cool as its going to be my test database server for the next 6 months.
These really are substantial bits of kit. It came on a wooden pallet and weights almost as much as i do!
The finish is really nice, and it looks really well constructed but then it should be for the amount these things cost. This is just a baby with only two of the four processor slots filled up, but still, with the external disk array and even with a substantial discount it still came to over £45k!
However, the cost of the hardware seems cheap when you look at the software we're going to be loading onto this bad boy.. Oracle Database Enterprise edition.. a cool £11.5k per CPU, so thats £23k in Oracle licences and thats before we have to pay the annual support costs!! (which you have to pay)
Once aspect of the server that seemed like a bit of an after thought was the CD/DVD drive. The rest of the server is a nice metallic silver, but the CD drive is black - it really looks like an after thought. Also, just about every other component on these machines is hot swappable. Not so the CD drive. So we have hot swappable PSU's Hot swap internal disks, hot swap fans, but if the CD drive fails we have to shut down the server to cold swap..crazy!