As sad as it is, all big three Unix workstation vendors (Sun, HP and IBM) have terminated their respective RISC workstation product lines. Which means that there are no more Sun Ultras or Blades, IBM IntelliStations or HP Visualize boxes much coveted in the not so distant past. I'm particularly impartial to Sun workstations and I think it is a big loss to the SPARC ecosystem as a whole. Regardless of what they tell you I think it is essential to have a workstation that is binary compatible with the big iron that is sitting in the data center. I think it is essential for development and system administration in any large shop and many sysadmin would probably attest to that. I'm not sure if Sun has been blinded by the bean counters prompting to cut the entire SPARC workstation product line, but I hope someone at Sun wakes up and realizes that the workstations are a big part of SPARC ecosystem and perhaps even it has to be subsidized to keep the SPARC followers happy. Sun should probably go as far as selling their SPARC based workstations at cost or even below cost to make it as easy as possible for the users to be comfortable and continue developing on the SPARC platform. The workstation would not have to be super fast as binary compatibility with the big iron is what counts the most. If you're as impartial as I'm about the continued life of SPARC on the desktop, please take your time to sign a petition to Sun to bring the SPARC workstation product line back:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/renew-sparc-workstations