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
 
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?
 
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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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.
 
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Because Vista and 2008 server require a newer version of the RDP client as there are some enhancements and changes to the protocol.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?
 
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.
 
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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