So the last company I was with never wanted to order new equipment, nor provide a workstation that I could putz around with, nor provide any training. Apparently, their world revolves around web-training or powerpoint training centered on Office 2003. Yeah, right, whatever...

I'm now at Hilton Grand Vacations (of the Paris variety, hehe) as their unix administrator and my first project was to migrate all of their Apache 2 web services off of the MAC OSX (yeah I know) servers. There's six total and for the first time ever, I had these guys in a meeting (you know the types, the ones who's paygrade is about 9x more than yours) looking at me saying "This is what we want...four web servers, four app servers, get what you think fits". All of this is going behind a F5-BigIP and I got to go nuts on the Sun site. It was like Christmas shopping all over with the company credit card!

Web servers consist of the following:

4 T1000 6-core UltraSPARC T1 processor, 8gb DDR2 memory, 80gb SATA hard drive, 4 10/100/1000 network ports, single power supply and Solaris 10 pre-installed.

App servers consist of the following:

4 T2000 4-core UltraSPARC T1 processor, 8gb DDR2 memory, dual 73gb SAS hard drives, 4 10/100/1000 network ports, dual redundant power supplies and Solaris 10 pre-installed.

Then they said "So you want a workstation with Solaris to play with? And what about training"...jaw off the floor and here's what I'm getting!

Web training on Solaris 10, Intermediate Administration.
Web training on Solaris 10, Advanced Administration for Sparc technology.

This web training will allow me to take the Sun certification exam, woot!

Workstation is as follows:

Sun Ultra 25 with a 1.34 UltraSPARC IIIi processor, 2gb DDR memory, dual 80gb SATA hard drives, 2 10/100/1000 network ports and Solaris 10 pre-installed. I also am getting a Sun 17" display and their USB unix-style keyboard.

I'm super pumped about this...the past three companies I've been with haven't ever even considered giving any real training or any workstation that's unix-based. It's always been "read a book" and "Oh, you need a workstation...ok, here's your Windows XP Pro station". Here I can actually work on a station that I configured and bought and then get certified, which is my plan.
Woohoo!