Sun Ray 2 is Worthy of a Closer Look

In the last few years, Sun has thoroughly redesigned the Sun Ray appliance to compete in the rapidly growing market for thin client desktop infrastructure. We recently had the opportunity to try out the new Sun Ray 2 in person at the Sun Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, CA and we were impressed. Sun has taken a product that has been around a long time and re-engineered it with all of the features customers expect today, plus some interesting capabilities that set it apart from the competition. Today’s Sun Ray 2 thin clients running Sun Ray Software 4 feature support for a wide variety of clients, enhanced security, and best of all the ability to runs Windows, Linux, Solaris, an Mac OS (or all four at once) equally well. The market has responded to these changes by buying Sun Rays at an ever increasing clip. According to Sun, sales have doubled from fiscal year 2006 to 2007.

One of the more interesting features of Sun Ray is its smart card authentication. Each desktop user in the organization has a credit card with an embedded Java chip that slides into the attached card reader. Users can show up at any Sun Ray in the company, log into their own account, and up will come their own desktop. When the card is removed without logging out, the desktop session remains suspended on the server until the card is inserted into another Sun Ray. Even days later from halfway around the world, the original desktop reappears, complete with all of the original applications. The Sun Secure Global Desktop Software provides this "Hot Desking" capability and also provides the ability to run multiple windows, each with a different application or operating system. For example, a Solaris 10, Windows, and Linux window can be open along with numerous browsers and desktop applications.

Management of thin clients has become increasingly important as IT departments deal with ever increasing complexity. Sun’s Desktop Manager 1.0 features an easy to use point-and-click web-based interface that makes centrally defining and configuring hundreds or thousands of desktops and their applications relatively quick and easy. The Sun Desktop Manager has three major components: configuration repositories that store configuration policies and organizational structure, management tools that help to enforce configuration policies, and agents residing on the client and fetch the configuration settings and apply them. It also features lockdown capabilities that prevent unauthorized people from making changes to configuration values or gaining access to unauthorized applications. Granted, this is a v1.0 product, but it seems to focus on what is truly needed in this space.

Overall, we are impressed with the improvements Sun has made to the Sun Ray. The current version is such a vast improvement over past iterations, it hardly seems fitting to continue calling it a "Sun Ray." Obviously, the entire thin client industry has improved tremendously in the last few years and there are now a number of excellent products from which to choose. But we feel Sun Ray 2 deserves special consideration in light of its smart card authentication and ease of management. If you are considering thin clients this year, and who is not, then you owe it to yourself to go down and try out the Sun Ray in person.