Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz is inviting customers to try Sun\'s Niagara Sun FireTM T2000 servers free for 60 days. In his December 18th weblog, Schwartz writes that similar Sun promotions have proven to be an "effective means of acquiring new customers.

"We ran an interesting experiment not too long ago, when we were rolling out our first Opteron servers. We distributed a bunch of free servers to new customers, just to get them exposed to Sun," he explained. "It had the desired impact - on average, the 'return' on the investment of a free server was an average purchase order of ~15 systems."

This new offer is shorter than the 90-day "Try It Before You Buy It" promotion the company originally proposed during the Sun Network Computing 2005 Q4 (NC05Q4) product launch held December 6, when the Niagara servers were introduced [15566].

This "Seeing is Believing" promotion is a limited quantity, limited time promotion. A choice of the following Sun Fire T2000 server configurations are being offered:

• T20-106A-08GA2C (6 cores, 1.0 GHz, 2x73 GB, 16-512 MB, 2xPSU)
• T20-108A-08GA2C (8 cores, 1.0 GHz, 2x73 GB, 16-512 MB, 2xPSU)
• T20-108A-16GA2C (8 cores, 1.0 GHz, 2x73 GB, 16x1 GB, 2xPSU)

Respondents will be pre-qualified based on several criteria including, but not limited to:

• Applications planned for use during testing and deployment
• Application availability on SolarisTM 10 Operating System (Solaris OS)
• Access to Solaris 10 OS skills for installation, deployment and management

All respondents will be notified of their qualification status.

Schwartz also has promised "...in the spirit of gift giving: the first users to deliver compelling testimonials on a publicly accessible blog get to keep their machine (the software's already free). The testimonial (positive or negative), must benchmark Niagara to another chipset/OS combination in actual use. The Niagara team will make the decisions, and it's in their sole discretion, but we've yet to place a limit on the number of systems we'll give away...." [...read more...]

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