Sun Startup Essentials

Sun Startup Essentials

Sun are a hardware company (and a software company too, but mostly they give that away for "free" [as in beer]), but with Sun Startup Essentials Sun are (almost) giving hardware away too as well as hosting/training and other services.

The program has been introduced into the UK and Ireland so is available this side of the pond.

It's easy to join (web sign-up) and once approved (which can take a couple of days) customers get access to the discounted hardware/etc.

It's probably a very good move for Sun as though they're taking a risk in supplying hardware on the cheap, if the startup succeeds they're likely to continue using Sun hardware and software.

Many people are used to using a LAMP environment which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python and Sun are trying to convert people to use SAMP which is the same stack based on Solaris instead of Linux. There are good reason to do this as MySQL is now owned by Sun so there's likely to be some Solaris optimisation on versions that come with Solaris (though MySQL's main development is still on Linux).

If x86 hardware is purchased the customer can still elect to run Linux rather than Solaris and even Windows.

It's a very cool program and Sun should be applauded for making it easy to join and use.