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Sun Rays For Linux
Tarantolato writes "According to an eweek story Sun Microsystems will be debuting a Linux port of their Sun Ray Server at Linux World this week. This would allow Sun Ray thin clients to be run off of a SuSE or Red Hat box, where you previously needed a Solaris-SPARC setup to do that."
The idea of Sun Rays is to save sysadmin's the hassle of fighting viruses/trojans/spamware/malware by constantly having to clean hard disk drives. The thin client has no hard disk drive; everything is downloaded off the network. It's like an X-server which can handle audio, video and 3D graphics. Access is gained by using ID cards.
Corporate customers were complaining about the cost of maintaining PC networks. Sun saw there was demand for low-cost multimedia terminals (companies still wanted to their staff to be able to view training videos) which would have access to a centralised server.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Overall, I think I would rather use a Sun ray simply because of the silence.
:) In fact, there is a distinct possibility that SunRay could actually be better than a local desktop (except for OpenGL work, of course).
The fact that the SunRay server might be an SMP box with FibreChannel disks and gobs of RAM doesn't hurt either
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Add the cost of support and you save even more. I once did a cost analysis for a fictional 1000 desktop enterprise. The outcome was basicaly that because of the lower wage and benfit costs for desktop support personel, the _entire_ hardware/software license cost (including some massive Sun servers) was recouped in ONE year. The next three years of the write off, we are talking a couple of million saved each year.
Now tell me if they are really that expensive. I think not. If a Linux server version does come out and works properly, I might be very tempted to scatter a couple of these around the house.
Not sure what the pricing is like now, but I looked into buying 50 of them at one point. In the UK it was going to cost me around £500 per station, plus of course the extra beef the servers needed (our network was ok so at least I didn't need to upgrade that). I couldn't justify the cost in comparison to PCs, which we were buying at arouns £1k at the time; for £500 extra the PC could be repurposed as a build machine, a test server, or whatever a project needed; they also came with 40Gb of disk, which would have cost us $$$ on the server. We could also save on PCs by not buying a new monitor for each PC replaced.
User's PCs weren't backed up, everyone had space on the servers which was raided and backed up; the cost of providing that much disk space, and backing it up, with the Sunray solution was prohibitive, and it would have been a single point of failure.
In the end, while it was cool, there were too many down sides. If I had been buying for a faily homogenous 'office' population, instead of developers, it would have been a closer-run thing.
Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about
1. Sunrays are not well received in the marketplace. Anonymous or not, there is no argument there. Rather than pretend that the marketplace is full of idiots who just need to see the light, sun should think about WHY sunrays are a failure and what they could do differently with other products to prevent future failures of this magnitude. That is the kind of thing I say when I want to shoot my mouth off.
2. Sunrays and tadpoles, regardless of how niftyness, are mutually exclusive. You can't use one with the other, so you have yourself a red herring there.
3. Sun is having their lunch eaten by linux, not by a bunch of dell/gateway/antivirus crap. Sunrays are expensive compared to linux on a 1999 era pentium telnetted to a server with the DISPLAY variable set. These are way cheaper and fairly simple to administer but no one wants them either.
Next time you see this anonymous coward, we'll be having a little chat about Java.