Ok..feeling much more enlightened after 4 hrs of CMIS and Alfresco exploration.
My query of getting a server got resolved by accessing the public cmis alfresco server which is available at http://cmis.alfresco.com/
I also downloaded CMIS Workbench for windows and have setup the alfresco server locally.
Both the servers can be connected with my java client (using Apache Chemisty libs). to connect remotely to the Alfresco server a local resovable name should be used. IP is not recognized.
One more option is to get a free trial from the alfresco cloud.
cheers, Saurav