orion, you are correct that sun still dominates the *diminishing* hi-end server market. but that will surely change. when i was a freshman in college, our computing labs were filled with these ultra sparc machines that cost 40K a pop. these days, ultra sparcs are a lot cheaper. the thing is that simple risc processors from intel can do things that only ultra sparcs and ibm mainframes could do 5-10 yrs ago. and now you can rack these cheap linux boxes in parallel ( kinda like oracle's grid computing) to produce a reliable and powerful machine. i guess you guys are the guinea pigs, but i thought that there already is a lot of support for linux from the big guys such as ibm, oracle, hp, emc and intel. no worries, though. dell and hp are catching up pretty fast on the high end servers and sun realizes it all too well. just look at sun's stock price. it's currently trading at below $4, while during it's peak, it was trading above $80. 6 yrs ago, sun looked invincible. today, things are a lot different. btw, are you using db2 or oracle? just curious. hushpup?? didja go to the beach???