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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (19489)	9/8/1999 5:41:00 PM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

From Forbes forbes.com Corona is a ray of sun (shine) By Om Malik NEW YORK. 10:20 AM EDT?Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW) has a new baby. Dubbed Corona for the last nine months, this new zero-administration device called Sun Ray is expected to be announced tomorrow. "The aim of this new device is to eliminate the cost of ownership of computers," says Gene Banman, vice president and general manager of information appliances and WebTop devices at Sun Microsystems. Banman says that the new device, based on Sun's new Hot Desk technology protocol, is initially going to be targeted at workgroups within big organizations. Sun hopes to sell the device to universities and other educational 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.