Sun introduces the "Sun Ray"

Doofuswrote to us about Sun's release of their newest effort to knock the PC off the corporate desktop. The Sun Ray is essentially "a juiced-up monitor", and is a thin-client solution. Cost is 10$ per month for 5 years, or 30$ per month for a more powerful client. Not much technical details in the article, but we'll update with more links as these appear.Update: 09/08 01:15 by H :Thanks to Paul Tomblin for a huge PDF file with the tech specs.

Comments

What kind of servers do you need to support these?

[volsung]

Sun Chief Executive ``Scott McNealy is smarter than a fox and can make all of this sound wonderful, but in fact very few corporations are going to buy this stuff,'' said David Wu, a San Francisco-based analyst for brokerage firm ABN AMRO Securities. ``Sun is a server company, period. If they want to give away software and make some cheap computers, so be it. But that doesn't change their (main) business.''

That guy hit it on the nose. Notice how all of Sun's recent announcements are server-centric? StarPortal needs a server to run, and these "Souped-up monitors" need a server to run as well. Guess what kind of server?

I'm actually curious to see what the resource requirements are to support a bunch of these things deployed in a company. One box per 5 clients? 25 clients? 50 clients? Is the server end a web server, or is it custom software for Solaris, etc...

It will be interesting to see how Sun balances forcing people to buy servers (which they want to do) with integrating this technology with a business's existing servers.