Based on projects I've worked on with SunRays, I'd be happy with that configuration for supporting up to 500 SunRays in a uni situation, expecting approx 100 to be being used at any one time. Some extra memory wouldn't go amiss, but memories cheap when you're runnning 500 SunRays of it!
Ideally you'd add a second machine for failover and to share the load, allowing for peak use.
You wouldn't need 25 Gb interfaces! You'd have 48 port switches with Gb uplinks and 2+ Gb interfaces on the servers.
I don't see the issue with having a dedicated network? So what? Also, newer versions of SunRay server software support vlans.
You wouldn't let users install their own software, that's the entire point of a controlled Uni environment. Giving them their own cpus and memory costs money and extra admin. If a student really needs a dedicated workstation, give them one - there's nothing wrong with a mixed environment.
There are tradeoff to be made in a SunRay environment, but I think they're a good solution.
I live in the UK - am I being in fair in thinking that a large number of Americans do seem to moan and spout on excessively about their supposed rights! I find this ironic in a country where workers have so few rights, there's no state health care, segregation still existed in the 60s, etc, etc, etc.
So what if you get checked at work? It so pretentious to say 'I'm a scientist, I'm surely beyond suspicion'.
People in the UK have lived with terrorism for years, from an organisation sponsored and recently actively funded by numerous freedom loving citizens in the US. Thanks for that.
We're used to the inconvenience of a little security. I've been stopped and searched by the police, I have my bag checked going into museums for goodness' sake.
I disagree. Cabling can be kept and yes, switches would have to be put in. They are cheap and get cheaper the more you buy - a modern network doesn't really have any place for hubs.
The solution is aimed as much at enterprises as SMEs.
The whole model is about TCO - not just looking at the hardware costs. SunRays are simply cheaper to run and manage.
Agreed, you can't snap your fingers and move to SunRays just like that from a PC architecture.
You might not make any savings on hardware once you've bought your infrastructure. The savings come from centrally managing your apps, your users, making use of hot desking etc. It's about lowever TCO over time.
It has to be thought about, but I think it's a good model to move to.
The City of Largo kept with its X-terminal architecture - moving to SunRays might have saved them more.
100Mb switches are cheap and having the clients on the same subnet isn't a problem. If you have quad fast ethernet cards in your servers, you can hang 100s of SunRays of a number of servers.
They're not bad at all for multimedia, but you're completely correct to say that they're not suited for CAD. They're principaly an office solution, so you'd still need a dedicated workstation for certain tasks.
I've found that having no local resources is actually an advantage! When people have gone home, I'm sitting there using a 12 CPU E4500 all for myself.
I think they make a good solution in a number of situations, but as with most things, it'd be crazy to go 100% down one route and ignore other options completely.
I presume you're interested in a GPL'd solution, but have you looked at Sun Rays from Sun? Sun have deployed them over pretty much all of their sites - I believe they have 40,000 seats now. Everyone, from admins to engineers, happily using a Unix desktop.
I can't see why they would drop HPUX for Linux. The support issues would be horrendous, they have 1000s of customers running on HPUX, porting to IA64 has long been their plan and has been what customers loyal to HP have bought into (whilst the others go off and talk to Sun).
Linux is good, but is nowhere near the 'enterprise' quality of HPUX. It doesn't even scale anywhere near what HPUX can do (let alone Solaris) and has nowhere near the number of apps that 'real' customers use.
It would make no business or technological sense for any of the big Unix vendors to drop their own Unix in favour of Linux, for several years, at least, the only exception being SGI, whose only chance might be to become a cheap Linux box shifter to survive, regardless of their OS and hardware technological superiority.
Superb response. In the UK people are equally paranoid about ID cards. The result is that if you get stopped by the police for some reason or you have to prove who you are, it ends up taking a great deal longer than it should do and your proof of id if often a credit card in conjuntion with an out of date student card that has your picture on it!
My experience of living abroad suggests that you have more freedom if you have an id card - you can easily and quickly prove who you are to the authorities and be on your way.
Re:Hmmm... not sure how to take the article
on
Linux on the Desktop
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· Score: 1
Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that moving to StarOffice isn't too painful an experience, if you don't rely on the more esoteric features of Office. My parents have managed fine. Sun use StarOffice throughout the organisation, where it's used by admins and techs alike quite happily.
In usability terms Gnome is easier to get on with than CDE and is easier to use for those familiar with Windows. The SunRay is Sun's desktop technology - if it's to succeed it needs a more user friendly, supported desktop, along with the numerous fun apps that come along with Gnome.
I use a Sun box every day, generally for office type work. When Gnome matches CDE's speed, I'll happily switch over for the Windows style task bar alone. You start to lose Windows in CDE after a while!
Put Solaris 8 on and then compare. 2.6 is 3+ years old.
Re:Marketing mindset a little strong.
on
Sun Launches JXTA
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· Score: 1
What's Joy done recently?
Well, after Berkeley Unix and stuff like vi and being involved with designing the first Sun worksations and the first Sparc processors he's been involved with designing the Majc processor, tonnes of Java stuff, Jini and JXTA, for example, as well as holding a senior role in a huge, very successful company.
Re:Is this a good first book on XML?
on
Inside XML
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· Score: 1
I first read Just XML, by John E Simpson, which is a little out of date, but covers the concepts behind XML. Now I'm working through Beginning XML by David Hunter, which is looking pretty good.
I'm not a professional programmer or computer science student, so I found it helpful to read Just XML to 'get my head round things' before moving onto the more technical book.
"Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?"
Was it ever? I've never read or seen anything to suggest it was. My impression has always been that in general you have huge inequality, low standards of education, no welfare state, widespread gun ownership, high crime rates, racism, a massive prison population, the worst obesity problem of any country in the world - the list goes on.
Personally I would recommend Northern Europe - good standards of living, good education. No guns. Cleaner than London (where I live). You pay 'high' income tax, but get something in return, compared to a lot of other places. Probably less entrepreneurial than the US, but you have to compromise somewhere...
First Direct are a classic example of people mis-understanding things. First Direct use a Java applet to provide online banking...but they'll only let you use IE4+.
Hard to imagine an example that more completely missed the point of the web, anytime/anywhere, etc.
>With Microsoft losing its Imperial hold, Sun is >beginning to look like a pretty shifty company, >casting doubt on its commitment to its customer >base.
Can we have some facts to back that up? I'm suspicious of the notion that any successful company or product can't be good. Last time I looked, IT was the most competitive business around - I doubt Sun can afford to neglect its customers.
If Linux gets more popular, will we start seeing everyone criticising it and vaunting FreeBSD instead?
Not if the current range contains chips that don't contain the fault. I doubt Sun would happily ship hundreds of servers with a chip containing an error that was discovered and rectified several months ago?
It's crazy to complain about people 'leaving it on' - My company encourages us to work from home and we get a free BT line, all costs paid, to access the web and email. I sometime stay connected for 13+ hours a day - 8 hours working, 5 hours downloading stuff, getting the news etc. I don't feel I'm abusing the deal.
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Based on projects I've worked on with SunRays, I'd be happy with that configuration for supporting up to 500 SunRays in a uni situation, expecting approx 100 to be being used at any one time. Some extra memory wouldn't go amiss, but memories cheap when you're runnning 500 SunRays of it!
Ideally you'd add a second machine for failover and to share the load, allowing for peak use.
You wouldn't need 25 Gb interfaces! You'd have 48 port switches with Gb uplinks and 2+ Gb interfaces on the servers.
I don't see the issue with having a dedicated network? So what? Also, newer versions of SunRay server software support vlans.
You wouldn't let users install their own software, that's the entire point of a controlled Uni environment. Giving them their own cpus and memory costs money and extra admin. If a student really needs a dedicated workstation, give them one - there's nothing wrong with a mixed environment.
There are tradeoff to be made in a SunRay environment, but I think they're a good solution.
I live in the UK - am I being in fair in thinking that a large number of Americans do seem to moan and spout on excessively about their supposed rights! I find this ironic in a country where workers have so few rights, there's no state health care, segregation still existed in the 60s, etc, etc, etc.
So what if you get checked at work? It so pretentious to say 'I'm a scientist, I'm surely beyond suspicion'.
People in the UK have lived with terrorism for years, from an organisation sponsored and recently actively funded by numerous freedom loving citizens in the US. Thanks for that.
We're used to the inconvenience of a little security. I've been stopped and searched by the police, I have my bag checked going into museums for goodness' sake.
Who cares?
Good point. And Sun aren't killing their CPU line and replacing it with Itanium. I just can't see the logic in HP's strategy.
I disagree. Cabling can be kept and yes, switches would have to be put in. They are cheap and get cheaper the more you buy - a modern network doesn't really have any place for hubs.
The solution is aimed as much at enterprises as SMEs.
The whole model is about TCO - not just looking at the hardware costs. SunRays are simply cheaper to run and manage.
Agreed, you can't snap your fingers and move to SunRays just like that from a PC architecture.
You might not make any savings on hardware once you've bought your infrastructure. The savings come from centrally managing your apps, your users, making use of hot desking etc. It's about lowever TCO over time.
It has to be thought about, but I think it's a good model to move to.
The City of Largo kept with its X-terminal architecture - moving to SunRays might have saved them more.
100Mb switches are cheap and having the clients on the same subnet isn't a problem. If you have quad fast ethernet cards in your servers, you can hang 100s of SunRays of a number of servers.
They're not bad at all for multimedia, but you're completely correct to say that they're not suited for CAD. They're principaly an office solution, so you'd still need a dedicated workstation for certain tasks.
I've found that having no local resources is actually an advantage! When people have gone home, I'm sitting there using a 12 CPU E4500 all for myself.
I think they make a good solution in a number of situations, but as with most things, it'd be crazy to go 100% down one route and ignore other options completely.
I presume you're interested in a GPL'd solution, but have you looked at Sun Rays from Sun? Sun have deployed them over pretty much all of their sites - I believe they have 40,000 seats now. Everyone, from admins to engineers, happily using a Unix desktop.
I can't see why they would drop HPUX for Linux. The support issues would be horrendous, they have 1000s of customers running on HPUX, porting to IA64 has long been their plan and has been what customers loyal to HP have bought into (whilst the others go off and talk to Sun).
Linux is good, but is nowhere near the 'enterprise' quality of HPUX. It doesn't even scale anywhere near what HPUX can do (let alone Solaris) and has nowhere near the number of apps that 'real' customers use.
It would make no business or technological sense for any of the big Unix vendors to drop their own Unix in favour of Linux, for several years, at least, the only exception being SGI, whose only chance might be to become a cheap Linux box shifter to survive, regardless of their OS and hardware technological superiority.
Superb response. In the UK people are equally paranoid about ID cards. The result is that if you get stopped by the police for some reason or you have to prove who you are, it ends up taking a great deal longer than it should do and your proof of id if often a credit card in conjuntion with an out of date student card that has your picture on it!
My experience of living abroad suggests that you have more freedom if you have an id card - you can easily and quickly prove who you are to the authorities and be on your way.
Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that moving to StarOffice isn't too painful an experience, if you don't rely on the more esoteric features of Office. My parents have managed fine. Sun use StarOffice throughout the organisation, where it's used by admins and techs alike quite happily.
Solaris 8 *is* free for commercial use, if the server it's running on 8 or fewer CPUs. This has been the case since Solaris 8 was released.
http://www.sun.com/solaris/binaries/
In usability terms Gnome is easier to get on with than CDE and is easier to use for those familiar with Windows. The SunRay is Sun's desktop technology - if it's to succeed it needs a more user friendly, supported desktop, along with the numerous fun apps that come along with Gnome.
I use a Sun box every day, generally for office type work. When Gnome matches CDE's speed, I'll happily switch over for the Windows style task bar alone. You start to lose Windows in CDE after a while!
They're not Java terminals, they're Sun Rays - completely different.
Put Solaris 8 on and then compare. 2.6 is 3+ years old.
What's Joy done recently?
Well, after Berkeley Unix and stuff like vi and being involved with designing the first Sun worksations and the first Sparc processors he's been involved with designing the Majc processor, tonnes of Java stuff, Jini and JXTA, for example, as well as holding a senior role in a huge, very successful company.
Is that enough?
I've never come across that.
How come you keep getting power cuts??
Yes, it would come with Solaris 8.
I first read Just XML, by John E Simpson, which is a little out of date, but covers the concepts behind XML. Now I'm working through Beginning XML by David Hunter, which is looking pretty good.
I'm not a professional programmer or computer science student, so I found it helpful to read Just XML to 'get my head round things' before moving onto the more technical book.
Buy yourself an Ultra 5, or get Solaris x86 and stick it on a PC. Ultra 5s are dead cheap.
"Don't forget that in the US your vote is counted"
I think the last few weeks have shown that this is patently not true.
"Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?"
Was it ever? I've never read or seen anything to suggest it was. My impression has always been that in general you have huge inequality, low standards of education, no welfare state, widespread gun ownership, high crime rates, racism, a massive prison population, the worst obesity problem of any country in the world - the list goes on.
Personally I would recommend Northern Europe - good standards of living, good education. No guns. Cleaner than London (where I live). You pay 'high' income tax, but get something in return, compared to a lot of other places. Probably less entrepreneurial than the US, but you have to compromise somewhere...
First Direct are a classic example of people mis-understanding things. First Direct use a Java applet to provide online banking...but they'll only let you use IE4+.
Hard to imagine an example that more completely missed the point of the web, anytime/anywhere, etc.
I'm sure VA Linux make good kit - but last time I checked they weren't making systems that scaled up to the 64 processor machines eBay are using...
>With Microsoft losing its Imperial hold, Sun is >beginning to look like a pretty shifty company, >casting doubt on its commitment to its customer >base.
Can we have some facts to back that up? I'm suspicious of the notion that any successful company or product can't be good. Last time I looked, IT was the most competitive business around - I doubt Sun can afford to neglect its customers.
If Linux gets more popular, will we start seeing everyone criticising it and vaunting FreeBSD instead?
Not if the current range contains chips that don't contain the fault. I doubt Sun would happily ship hundreds of servers with a chip containing an error that was discovered and rectified several months ago?
It's crazy to complain about people 'leaving it on' - My company encourages us to work from home and we get a free BT line, all costs paid, to access the web and email. I sometime stay connected for 13+ hours a day - 8 hours working, 5 hours downloading stuff, getting the news etc. I don't feel I'm abusing the deal.