Sun Ray is interoperable with CTXS, if CTXS will deal with Sun and not lose its MSFT license. Is this right? anyone. From Forbes in re, Sun Ray:"The aim of this new device is to
eliminate the cost of ownership of computers," says Sun Microsystems.
It is initially targeted at workgroups within big organizations. universities and othereducational institutions, financial
services firms, government agencies and call centers.
The device, which is roughly the size
of a notebook computer, will be
leased to these institutions for
$9.99 a month for five years. Among
the companies expected to sign up
are Cable and Wireless Hong Kong,
ScotiaBank, Carrollton City School
System, the state of Georgia and
Singapore's national computer
board, Singapore One.
While attempts by Sun and cohorts
such as International Business
Machines (nyse: IBM) to push
network computers and thin clients
have fallen flat so far, Sun Ray is
the first real credible threat to the
Wintel duopoly in the corporate
space.
"There is no computing in this
model, everything happens on the
server," says J. Duane Northcutt,
Ph.D., chief technologist of
Information appliances and WebTop
devices at Sun. Dr. Northcutt lead
the team, which designed the Sun
Ray device. "This device does not
really need any new architecture,
and you can use the existing local
area network infrastructure," he
says.
The device runs on a 100-MHz Sparc
chip and has no real operating
system. It has a smartcard slot, an
Ethernet port and USB ports to hook
up other devices such as printers
and connection points for a monitor
and a keyboard. Sun scientists are
working on reducing the size of the
device so that it can be embedded
into a flat-panel monitor.
Plugged into a
100-megabits-per-second Ethernet
network, Sun Ray--which has a
built-in Ethernet board--can pull all
the applications and data it needs
directly off the corporate server,
without the need for local storage.
The device has a graphics chip that
translates the data from the server
onto the computer screen, says
Banman. Moreover, since Sun Ray is
a stateless device, a user can move
from one desk to another without
carrying any equipment with the
exception of a smartcard. The
corporate server recognizes your
identity through a card you insert
into Sun Ray's smartcard slot, and
serves up your applications and data
accordingly.
The device can also handle
streaming audio and video, a huge
improvement over dumb terminals of
yore and critical for the
high-bandwidth future. Again, if you
unplug the computer during a video
playback, the image pauses until
you plug the computer in elsewhere
on the network. If someone knocks
out the cables at the back
accidentally and reconnects after a
few minutes, the user session
resumes at the point of interruption.
On the server side of things, there
is some additional software, which
includes an authentication manager;
a session manager, which maps the
user session on a server to a
physical desktop unit; and an
administration tool, which is used to
provide usage monitoring and user
management.
The client and the server software
together are being referred as Hot
Desk Protocol by Sun, and it is
interoperable with Citrix Metaframe,
HP UX, IBM AIX and other such
operating systems.
About 40 of these devices can be
run off a single central processing
unit, according to Banman. Add
more CPUs and you could add 40
times the number of Sun Ray
devices to the network. Sun hopes
to sell more than a million such
machines, and it is going to sharply
boost the sales of Sun's
conventional line of $20,000-plus
servers on the back-end.
Sun plans to first extend the device
into large organizations spread over
diverse geographic locations before
going after the consumer market
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