[ptribble]

For illumos, the sweet spot is the 10-15 year old Sun gear you can pick up on eBay. Works well, supported, not overly expensive.

Newer SPARC systems are really quite good. And pretty cost-effective too. The problem is that the starting price is out of reach, and almost nobody is offering a cloud service based on SPARC, so you can't hire it either.

I'm running illumos on SPARC. I have some old hardware (desktop and server) that I like to make use of. Time, yes, but I'm not putting money into it.

And while OpenJDK upstream has dropped support for SPARC and Solaris, that was really all about problems with the Studio compiler. I' maintaining an illumos OpenJDK port with the gcc toolchain on x86 - it's not excessively hard, and realistically if you're using a common toolchain and common CPU most standards-compliant code is portable at the OS layer.