Solaris

Please excuse my noobie ignorance, I have just taken posession of a ULTRA ENTERPRISE 3000 for a song. I know it is old , is it worth powering up, or worth more as scrap metal? Would a $1000 pc have more grunt as a web server? Google doesn't seem to be able to answer my question. I also have 2 storage arrays and a tape backup unit. Any ideas what it is worth?

Kim

To find out what it is worth, check on ebay. You can buy old sun gear there and you could get an idea of its price checking the active auctions.

As far as power, a $1000 PC today would smoke it for web serving I would guess. That Sun is from about 1998 or so, and has 400 mhz or slower processors. The one advantage it would have over a modern PC would be the ability to handle a lot more I/O, so if you'll be hitting those disk arrays hard that would be a factor. Also, if you could run multiple instances of your web app running several on each processor of the Sun (Enterprise 3000 could have up to 8 processors I think) it might beat out a single processor PC that way. But as far as raw speed goes it won't even be close - the modern processor will be 10x faster or more.