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Sun Rays For Linux

Posted by timothy on from the shining-example dept.

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."

2 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what is it? by mikael · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  2. Re:Completely silent-Dead giveaway. by Bazzargh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.