On November 28, Sun announced the first round winners of its Open Performance Contest, part of the Try and Buy program that has seen over 3,000 systems evaluated at no cost by potential customers.

To participate, all customers have to do is try out a product from Sun’s Try and Buy list, and publicly publish performance result findings. By rewarding the free and uncensored publishing of performance results, Sun is taking the concept of transparency and openness to a new level. Each month all entries from the Open Performance Contest are judged by a panel of Sun engineers, product management and technical marketing and up to one winner per product is selected. The prize is getting to keep the system trialed – free.

Sun is extending the Open Performance contest through June 2007.

Highlights from a few of Sun’s Open Performance Contest winners:

“As it is, DigiTar will save between 50-75% of our MySQL operations costs by moving our mission-critical MySQL operations to a pair of [Sun Fire] T2000s. Overall, it will help us eliminate the need for 8 HP DL145 G2s, not to mention drastically simplify our HA environment and increase our possible capacity by a factor of 2.” DigiTar WhitePaper, Thomas Rampelberg.

“Overall, I’m pleased with the performance of the Sun Ultra 20 M2 … Another thing worth mentioning is that Solaris (and the Sun Studio compiler) outperformed Windows (and Visual C++) by almost 15%. Solaris outperformed Windows in almost every benchmark category, even outperforming Windows dramatically in some specific tests (such as some of the floating point benchmarks.) If you’re working with processor-intensive tasks, Solaris might be the operating system for you.” -John Poole, GeekPatrol.

“[Sun Fire] T2000 is an excellent machine to build big parallel computing clusters or big data centers. If we look at the SWaP results is clear that an array of [Sun Fire] T2000 machines will give us a powerful supercomputer and we will make big savings in power consumption and space.” -Mitch Theys, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Our data center electricity bills cross my desk every month so I’m glad to see Sun pushing hard on this issue. The [Sun Fire] T2000 and T1000 that I tested both met or exceeded what Sun’s data sheet says they consume.” -Charles Lamb, Sleepycat Software.

The contest winners to date are: Nik Clayton with CRF Consulting LTD, Mitch Theys and the University of Illinois at Chicago, Charles Lamb from Sleepycat Software, Jon Emmons with Plymouth State University, Thomas Rampelberg of DigiTar, John Poole from GeekPatrol, Dirk Wetter of Dr. Wetter IT-Consulting, Stefan Rubner, and Colm MacCarthaigh with HEANet.