Slashdot Mirror
Sun's Global Desktop Released
aphaenogaster writes "Suns Global Desktop version 4.2 has been released and appears to be quite effective. Applications load very quickly, and is not limited to Sparc or Solaris. Applications piped to a desktop across a slow DSL line appear to work very well. Sun has also set up a test server for users to play with."
Remember the last time when SUN made a public-available demo of their grid-computing thingy.
I wonder how much time it... Oh wait, their server is already down.
For those of you who wondered... this isn't new, just a new name. I'll never understand why their marketing chose to change the name to something nobody knew. Perhaps trying to re-launch it?
Sun has actually done a good job of fixing a lot of java bugs since they acquired Tarantella.
For those of you who don't know about how SGD/Tarantella work, it's a session server/screen scraper combo that allow you to have access to Windows and Linux apps or entire desktops that can be served from arrays of application servers.
It uses a protocol called AIP that adapts to the available bandwidth and can scale down well for low bandwidth links.
The good things about SGD are:
- Transportable workspaces
- great for providing VERY LOW bandwidth links to console-based apps
- enterprise authentication
- ability to create and serve applications based on centrally managed user and application groupings
- ability to manage many different OS sessions and mix of sessions from OSes in a single login session
- pass-through printing to local printer
- ability to connect local hard drive to remote systems
- Client is trivial to install for users
- a rich html application page can be created that can serve many of the requirements for previously locally installed apps
- works very well for deployments that many many users to a few application set profiles that can load balance between arrays of application servers
The bad things about SGD are:
- it's a 3-tier architecture and if/when you overload the server or hit an OS bug and need to restart it, UNIX users lose x-sessions
- not ideal for mapping of many users to unique resources where sessions are very long lived
- some java 2d and 3d stuff takes up a lot of bandwidth
It's worth checking out. Some users prefer vnc or NX, but SGD really is an enterprise solution - not just a machine a to machine b tool for a single user.
Well, maybe if you did a little reading...
And if you're being forced to use a browser to access your server, who says that you're not on a machine with keyloggers and screen capturing?
I admit I work for Sun.
How is this any different then what Google is doing (aside from being the "benevolent and all holy" Goggle versus the "almost as evil as Microsoft" Sun)? The client should never matter when running the application and if you look here http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=433240 e1 you can get the client application for just about anything including dumb terminals and handheld devices.
d b9
And stating that Sun is trying to put all applications on Sun systems is a bunch of crap. The design of the product is to have a gateway to all vendors applications. So you continue to run your existing applications and connect to them from the gateway, and no it doesn't have to be Solaris http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=43321