In practice at the time I know we used Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 pizza boxes as servers. Until the various Ultras came out it was pretty common to see stacks of the

In practice at the time I know we used Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 pizza boxes as servers. Until the various Ultras came out it was pretty common to see stacks of them running firewalls, dns (...and sometimes nis) or web servers next to the big iron running databases and such. The 10 and 20 in particular had a much longer lifespan than a lot of folks realize. There were cheap (for the time) upgrades to put quad CPU's and a decent selection of SCSI HBA's, Ethernet NIC's and even some ATM interfaces. I know I still saw those units fairly commonly well into the mid 2000's.