Sun Ray

Basher

Basher

Basher

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,158
Hi Guys,

Does anyone have any experience in designing/deploying/using Suns Sun Ray equipment (http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/)? I went for a demo today at their training centre and it all looked pretty useful - especially in the public sector with pressures in terms of carbon footprint and energy saving

Thoughts, comments?

Regards,
James
 
I did a development environment a while back, I liked them a lot. Design and deployment is much the same as any thin client solution but the problem came compared to other thin client solutions, that being that solutions from the likes of HP are friendlier to most help desk types and seemed to come out cheaper. It's real utility seems to come if you're deploying custom java apps to thin clients...

Carbon footprint isn't just a public sector thing either, one of our big clients (FTSE100 etc.) has announced to shareholders they'd be carbon neutral in 2 years. Quite how they'll achieve that without planting a rainforest isn't something I've worked out yet.
 
Yeah we looked at HP solutions, but the benefit of Sun, certainly for us (and our clients - we're a managed services company) was that the Sun Rays were ultra thin - so longer life on the desktop. The HP ones you seem to have different 'thin' clients with different capabilities.

We really liked the truly bareness of the sun solution in that is really has nothing at all on it - enabling it to adapt to future demands quickly, as all it really does it present whatever it gets told to onto a screen.

That sound about right?
 
Basher said:
Yeah we looked at HP solutions, but the benefit of Sun, certainly for us (and our clients - we're a managed services company) was that the Sun Rays were ultra thin - so longer life on the desktop. The HP ones you seem to have different 'thin' clients with different capabilities.

We really liked the truly bareness of the sun solution in that is really has nothing at all on it - enabling it to adapt to future demands quickly, as all it really does it present whatever it gets told to onto a screen.

That sound about right?
Click to expand...

Thats what the HP ones do! The blade workstations are a similar product which works a bit differently but the HP thin clients serve the sole purpose of putting a RDP or Citrix session onto the local screen. The newer ones have a web browser onboard as well which is handy, no need to fire up the remote session to check a webpage...

That said one thing I love the sun clients for is the session on a smartcard ability which is really cool for users.
 
I have only used the Sun Rays as a end user. We had them running Solaris 10 and it was a bit laggy surfing the web. General usage was good though and the smartcard stuff is really funky.
 
bigredshark said:
Thats what the HP ones do! The blade workstations are a similar product which works a bit differently but the HP thin clients serve the sole purpose of putting a RDP or Citrix session onto the local screen. The newer ones have a web browser onboard as well which is handy, no need to fire up the remote session to check a webpage...

That said one thing I love the sun clients for is the session on a smartcard ability which is really cool for users.
Click to expand...

I thought the HP ones were less 'thin' as they had CPU/Memory which the sun boxes dont - making the life of the sun solution potentially much longer.

I can't seem to find a HP thin client without CPU/Memory.

Plus you mention session on a smartcard - surely the session is never 'on the card'? The card is just acting as a unique identifier to the session on the server(s) just like a username/password/biometrics would?

James
 
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Basher said:
I thought the HP ones were less 'thin' as they had CPU/Memory which the sun boxes dont - making the life of the sun solution potentially much longer.

I can't seem to find a HP thin client without CPU/Memory.
Click to expand...

The Sun ones have a CPU and memory, they have a networking stack and run a cut down OS, they have to connect to the Sun Ray Server somehow. I would expect lifetime to be no different to the HP ones and either will far exceed normal replacement cycles...
 
Basher said:
Sun Rays have no OS on board - that's something they made very clear. What I don't understand - is why do HP have so many different thin client products (e.g. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307.html)?

James
Click to expand...

It does, it'd just sit there without one so something is running on it and that's an OS. Sure it's not full blown Solaris but the HP clients don't run full blown windows. If sun are making noises about there's being reliable because it 'doesn't run an OS' then they're indulging in some dodgy marketing.

A thin client will be more reliable than a desktop in terms of 1000 units deployed, but you'll still have failures. In real terms one thin client solution will be very unlikely to be more reliable than another in real terms.

HP have a big range but they support a bigger range of protocols and some have expansion options.

Sun make a good product though, I've used it before and it's pretty cool but unless you've got apps engineered for Solaris specifically (particularly java apps) then it's not stand out better than other offerings.
 
The guys were saying that HP's solution had to be updated (firmware) in order to support vista, why would this be if all the box did is blindly connect to a remote server? Sun's solution worked for vista from day one.

I'm not necessarily saying suns solution is better - I'm just trying to understand the differences in offerings.
 
Basher said:
The guys were saying that HP's solution had to be updated (firmware) in order to support vista, why would this be if all the box did is blindly connect to a remote server? Sun's solution worked for vista from day one.

I'm not necessarily saying suns solution is better - I'm just trying to understand the differences in offerings.
Click to expand...

Because Vista and 2008 server require a newer version of the RDP client as there are some enhancements and changes to the protocol. It can't connect blindly, nothing can, it has to run some kind of software to connect...
 
bigredshark said:
Because Vista and 2008 server require a newer version of the RDP client as there are some enhancements and changes to the protocol. It can't connect blindly, nothing can, it has to run some kind of software to connect...
Click to expand...

So how did the Sun boxes not need updating?
 
I used to work with sunray 2's a lot, they are superb :)
Power draw is about 4 watts & all the clever stuff is done backend on a solaris server running sunray software so you can run all sorts of unix scripts for load balancing & monitoring/logging. The sunray server runs windows connector software so you can connect to a terminal server or vdi desktop, so an update of this software has essentially updated all the clients.
The speed they run at has to be seen to be believed, there is no lag compared to using rdp or a conventional thin client running xpe.
Drawbacks are if additional connectivity is required, eg usb devices, the xpe os can be better for this depending on the device.
There have only been the 2 models from sun since they came out about 10 years ago. Conventional thin clients have a shorter lifespan, need an updated rdp client? You will need a memory upgrade or a new device then!
I absolutely love them & the javacard hotdesking is just awesome.
 
The last supposedly "thin client" i saw from HP was a mobile solution and the size of a beefy laptop anyway ... and this was a week or so ago. The Suns Are Cool :D
 
Nomisf said:
The last supposedly "thin client" i saw from HP was a mobile solution and the size of a beefy laptop anyway ... and this was a week or so ago. The Suns Are Cool :D
Click to expand...

Sun's 'thin' laptop is just as beefy as HP's. Their thin client devices are a similar size with sun's perhaps being a little thinner and lighter.
 
Basher said:
Sun's 'thin' laptop is just as beefy as HP's. Their thin client devices are a similar size with sun's perhaps being a little thinner and lighter.
Click to expand...

Really? I have never seen a convential thinclient that is even close to the size of a sunray2.
I unfortuantly have an hp client on my desk at present, its massive compared to my sr2 & the last batch of the latest wyse terminals I had in to evaluate were equally large. They also drew about 13 watts compared to the sunrays 4 watts when plugged into a power meter. Not a problem with just a few but when you deploy 1000's the power savings are considerable.
 
Just looked at this a bit further and it seems the Sun Rays run on a very small firmware (500-600k) and an equally small amount of RAM. Whereas the HP boxes run embedded operating systems (e.g. XPe) which seems completely overkill when all we want to do is get access to a remote system. To have the increased footprint of an embedded operating system seems unnecessary, especially when some clients even feature on board media players and web browsers! Surely the whole point is that NOTHING (except the connection software) is on the thin clients - otherwise you're going to have to update the clients just like you would with a normal desktop machine.

Thoughts?
 
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