By William Fellows
Sun Microsystems Inc duly unveiled its second assault on the thin client market yesterday with the $500 Sun Ray 1 enterprise appliance terminal and Hot Desk server software which it claims will enable users to create client networks with virtually zero administration costs in LAN environments. Despite the name, Sun Ray is a workgroup, not consumer or enterprise play in its initial guise.
Applications run on a server and are fed through a LAN to a Sparc Solaris server hosting Hot Desk and other server-based management software which presents the application to the client through a PC-style desktop environment over dedicated Ethernet connections. In its first incarnation the Hot Desk and other server software runs only on Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 on Sparc servers, which is where Sun makes its money on the whole enterprise. There is no local processing except for management of the screen, network connection, smart card reader, mouse and keyboard functions which is handled by the small Sun Ray box, (nee Corona). Sun guarantees a response time of no more than one tenth of a second for each keyboard stroke or mouse click.
The value proposition for users is that all software is run, managed and upgraded centrally. The Hot Desk server software and Sun Ray server software (we couldn’t tell the two apart and Sun was giving little away) provides authentication and session and administration services. The user can log in to the network at any Sun Ray terminal by inserting a smart card with stored network access details or by typing a password. Each user’s session, including desktop and application environments is mapped from the server to the particular Sun Ray being used. Unplugging the device does not mean lost data as state information resides on the server.
Sun suggests that users allocate 64Mb memory on the Solaris server for each active attached Sun Ray 1, meaning those clients whose applications are driving CPU cycles, which is typically a 20-to-1 active user to server CPU ratio according to the company.
Sun says Sun Ray can display applications hosted on various platforms. The Hot Desk and server software transmits screens image changes to it coming from NT, mainframe, Unix or Linux. Of course the application server needs to touch or interface with Solaris and Hot Desk using another connectivity protocol including Citrix ICA, MetFrame, NT 4.0 TSE, X11 X Windows (for AIX, HP-UX and other Unix applications; Sunlink 3270 or third party 5250 terminal emulators or Sun’s PCNetLink. ISVs we spoke to said the job of connecting applications running on Solaris to Hot Desk was trivial and required no API changes.
Sun will lease Sun Ray for $10 a-month over five years; it costs $1 to buy at the end of that period. $30 a-month over the same period buys a server to run Hot Desk, installation, service and support, plus the Hot Desk server software itself and Sun’s StarOffice Microsoft Office-compatible application suite. Service and support agreements are where we make the bucks, said Sun president and chief operating officer, Ed Zander.
Direct comparisons with Sun’s first go-round at thin clients, the ill-fated JavaStation I are obvious: Sun Ray looks like a stripped-down JavaStation 1 and Hot Desk at first glance seems to fulfill a similar role to the Java-based server-side software that serviced JavaStations. However there are fundamental differences between Sun Ray and network computers, Net PCs or X terminals. JavaStation 1 (which Sun insists it is selling for the time being but won’t say how many it has shipped) uses an UltraSparc IIep chip, runs a JavaOS operating system and processes pieces of the Java application front-end locally.
Sun Ray uses a 99MHz IIep with 2Mb RAM – information Sun did not give up easily in order to prevent just such comparisons – to put 1280 x 1024 24-bit 2D graphics on the screen but has no operating system. It comes with 10/100-Base T Ethernet and four USB slots, audio/video facilities and supports the mon
itors that Sun currently ships.
Sun said it put the cheapest, most widely available technologies together in order to get Sun Ray 1 to market as quickly as possible. It claims the work took nine months. Where JavaStation 1 was positioned as a PC or green screen replacement, Sun Ray is destined for use in dedicated application environments including call centers and help desks; in education; government; financial services; ASPs and by ERP applications.
Ironically by gradually putting together a complete desktop to data center solution ring-fenced around Sparc Solaris servers (including applications, middleware and storage) the Sun enterprise now resembles the IBM mainframe/terminal architecture it replaces more closely than ever. Indeed in its own material, Sun says the closest equivalent to Sun Ray 1 is an IBM 3270 green screen character terminal – except that Sun Ray 1 has graphics. Zander even echoed IBM chairman Louis Gerstner’s words when he said that Sun Ray indicates that the end of the PC era is coming.
The key to Sun Ray is the server software according to Zander. Sun Ray architect Duane Northcutt explained the Hot Desk and other server software is a veneer or application-specific protocol on top of Solaris which delivers data over DHP (for initialization), user datagram protocol (for multimedia) and TCP/IP (for connections). Sun claims the software fits onto a floppy disk.
Sun Ray and Hot Desk in their initial guises are ring-fenced to local Sparc Solaris servers (it didn’t say when a Solaris x86 version would be available). However a second generation of technologies already planned will remove another administration cost by allowing Hot Desk, and therefore Sun Ray clients, to be managed remotely over the web. To get there Sun will effectively turn the Hot Desk and Sun Ray server software environment into a cache that can be hosted on a local thin server appliance which it has yet to announce. Sun’s only dedicated ‘appliance’ server to date is the ‘Flapjack’ rack-and-stack version of the Netra t designed for ISPs and ASPs.
Sun Ray 2 will use an UltraJava chip (which Sun effectively re- announced recently as Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing or MAJC) that will provide support for 3D modeling and a shared graphics pipe. It will enable Sun to extend the market for Sun Ray to more compute and graphics-intensive markets. As well as making more use of Java, Sun Ray 2 will also support networked devices including network printers and zip drives using Jini.
Northcutt says Sun will make the software available via its open source-like Community Source Program in about six months time, which will enable third parties to port the software to other platforms including NT and other Unixes. Don’t hold your breath.
Sun, which delayed Sun Ray’s launch from July because of a lack of customers to showcase, lined up Scotiabank, LearningStation.com and the technical training unit of Cable & Wireless Hong Kong as commercial users, and also had a raft of government agencies and universities nodding their approval.
