In a meeting today we looked at three options from HP and were told that Sun wants to compete with HP and match prices. The three HP options differed primarily in terms of the CPUs: Intel v. AMD. With AMD we could get cheaper DDR2 RAM but with Intel we would have to buy pricier DDR3 RAM. All could take SATA 3G HDDs with a RAID controller that would allow us to use RAID1 (simple mirroring) with two 1TB drives per unit. All were dual-socket quad-core machines, thus 8 cores per unit. I was thinking 4GB RAM per core or 32GB RAM per unit. They are 1U rack mountable. These are the two machines that we focused on most: HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Server (with Intel Xeon X5550) http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3884343.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN HP ProLiant DL165 G5 Server (with AMD Opteron 2384) http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3580133.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN With the configurations we were shown, the Intel was $2995 and the AMD was $1769, but those prices would increase with added RAM and probably with added HDD space. We decided that we need to do some testing to compare the two machines, and we have a couple of machines available. So I'm going to run some of my genome-scanning code to see how the machines perform. Do any of you have any opinions on these options, especially Xeon v. Opteron? I was told that Xeon was always faster but Opteron was cheaper. For some jobs Xeon was 20% faster and for some it was 100% faster. My guess is that I will do better, for my work, with a larger number of cheaper processors, but I'm going to do some testing. Mike