Sun Ray Bandwidth vs. Citrix

One of the most misunderstood things about any thin client protocol is the required bandwidth. At Sun we tell customers that you should have 384 Kbps per live session for a good user experience. Citrix however uses a marketing number of "on average" 20 Kbps per second.

A smart person should ask exactly how long the period of time that average is over and what was the user doing. Sadly I don't run into too many smart people when talking about thin client bandwidth. Usually they miss the key word "average" and ask why the Sun Ray protocol (Appliance Link Protocol, or ALP) needs so much more than Citrix. As you can imagine this difference causes great concern over where to place devices in remote office scenarios. Should the Sun Ray Server be kept local to the DTU’s to minimize network traffic? Can Citrix really operate @ 20 Kbps while displaying a full screen 24 bit desktop?  You decide (Note to viewers...My voice is not lispy like that..damn flash compression!)

Note that this is not an exercise to bash Citrix. I have nothing but love and respect for Citrix. They have great software and vision. Furthermore no other company has done more to advance thin client computing than Citrix. This is an attempt to seperate marketing speak from the facts. The only thing worse than letting marketing folks speak to technical details is having executive types regurgitate marketing speak about technical details. The only bad thing I can say about Citrix is that they won't wake up and smell the Java and write a recent ICA Client for Solaris x86.

So what can we say about averages? Really nothing. Averages are about as useful in recommending thin client bandwidth needs as they are for telling you how to dress for Las Vegas. Las Vegas has an average temperature of 75 degrees. What that average doesn't tell you though is that it is not uncommon for summer temps to near 120 degrees and winter temps to get in the 30 degree ranges. You could wind up either suffering from heat stroke or freezing to death if you dressed for the average.

So let's compare apples and apples and drop the term average and see what Sun Ray requires and what Citrix requires doing relatively the same thing. First let me explain the test environment so you can duplicate it on your own.

Hardware

The following hardware was used for testing:

Desktop Unit = Sun Ray 1G

Monitor = 24" LCD @ 1920x1200

Sun Ray Server = Sun Ray V250

Dual 1.2 GHz UIII-i Processors

8 GB RAM

Citrix Server = Sun W2100Z

Dual AMD Opteron 246 (2 GHz)

2 GB RAM

Windows PC (for ICA Client Tests)

Dual AMD Opteron 246 (2 GHz)

2 GB RAM

Software

The Following Software was used:

Solaris 9 Update 7

Sun Ray Server 3.1

Citrix ICA Client for Solaris SPARC 8.26

Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 (Windows)

Windows 2003 Server SP1

OpenOffice 2.0 (Solaris)

Microsoft Office 2003 (Windows)

Firefox 1.0.7 (Solaris)

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Solaris/Windows)

Internet Explorer (Windows)

Windows XP Professional SP2 (Citrix Client)

Citrix Metaframe Program Neighborhood 9.0 (Windows)

Network Monitoring

All network traffic was measured by using Ethereal Network protocol analyzer. Ethereal was executed on both the Citrix Server and the Sun Ray Server. One instance of Ethereal monitored the data between the Citrix Server and the PC and another instance monitored the traffic between the Sun Ray Server and the Sun Ray DTU. Filters were then used to remove any other network traffic that did not pertain to the test.

Methodology

To simulate what a typical office worker might do, a 10 minute routine was performed by an actual person. While it is possible to automate these routines with scripting technologies, this method of testing does not represent the keystrokes and the mouse movements that a real user would create. The productivity test was comprised of the following actions:

Log in

Check email

Respond to three emails

Download two attachments (less than 1 Mb each) to from two separate emails

Open a new word processing document. Type the following paragraph into document and save:

---

Enterprise deployments indicate that only 25-40% of DTU’s in a failover group are typically active at any given time. For example, recent samples taken from a campus with nearly 1450 Sun Ray terminals only 433 DTU, or 30%, were active.

Utilization will vary by the role of the user. For example, a call center may have much higher usage rate since the agents are using their terminals more often than an average office worker.

---

Watch PowerPoint presentation

Surf these web logs:

http://blogs.sun.com/ThinGuy

http://blogs.sun.com/christophersaul

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan

                    View Excel spread sheet. Scroll up and down and change tabs.

Surf to CNN.com and view this URL

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/14/dutch.arrests

Check email again

Logout

Test Cases

Since the goal of this test is to help foster decisions on proper equipment placement in a network topology, it is important that each protocol was observed separately to get their utilization numbers. For the Sun Ray tests, a Gnome desktop was used via a Sun Ray Desktop Unit to perform the productivity test.

Likewise a traditional PC running Windows XP Professional and the Citrix Metaframe Program Neighborhood Client for Windows was used to gather statistics about the ICA sessions for the productivity test.

Results

First, let's talk "averages". Doing these tests the Sun Ray "averaged" 230 Kbps. Citrix averaged 268 Kbps.

What???? What happened to the 20 Kbps marketing number? Did I mention what my "average" Sun Ray bandwidth is while I'm travelling? Do you want to buy some ocean front property in Nevada?

Here are the ethereal graphs for each:

First the Sun Ray results:

Next is the Citrix graph:

There's the proof in black and white.  Well, more colors than that, but you get the point.  Or do you?  Let's drop the averages and look at the "actual" bandwidth used for each so we can see how high each protocol peaked.

Again let's look at the Sun Ray data:

Now let's look at Citrix:

So what does this tell us?  It shows us the performing the same tasks, Sun Ray not only required less bandwidth "on average", but is also required less peak bandwidth.  Sun Ray peaked around 3 Mbps while Citrix peaked over 4 Mpbs.  Quite a difference from 20 Kbps don't you think?

Let's graph that:

 

Hopefully these results will be somewhat eye opening to those out there that are suckers for marketing speak.  We've simply got a killer protocol in Sun Ray server.  When you consider that the Sun Ray does all this with a 100 Mhz CPU, no OS, zero administration of the desktop, can mount USB mass storage, scanners, HID devices, etc, it's really a very interesting device.  A life changing device if I can steal a line from  Bob Doolittle.

The bottom line is that you cannot trust averages, or at very least you must understand what the average consists of.  Thin client bandwidths are self throttling and will use the bandwidth you give them.  You need to run your own tests with real users, real applications, and don't average the results.

Or perhaps a simpler explanation is that marketing folks don't understand the difference in Kbps and KBps.

 

Posted on: Dec 03, 2005

Posted by: ThinGuy

Category: Sun Ray

Permanent link to this entry

Comments:

Any idea of how RDP fits into the mix?

Posted by John Clingan on December 03, 2005 at 10:02 PM PST #

RDP is pretty close to both ICA and ALP. ICA does handle audio better than either ALP or RDP, but from productivity standpoint, they're very close. RDP does a much better job with streaming video, at least from my subjective tests of watching movies off of quicktime.com.

Posted by ThinGuy on December 03, 2005 at 10:05 PM PST #

A NICE JOB! Your recommendation about testing as per specific clientele requirements should be 'law' at SUN. (Not nearly enough SUN iForce centers.) Product suitability claims by IT organizations have become 'truly' dubious of late.

Posted by William R. Walling on December 04, 2005 at 02:53 PM PST #

Thank you Craig! That's what I always told and nobody listened. As we have citrix clients since years and Sun Rays since exactly one year now (first SUN customer deploying Sun Rays over WAN connections) I can say that your example is real life and the same in our production system. As we started with Citrix we also believed in marketing and started with 250 kbit/s lines. All of them were upgraded to 2 Mbit/s after some weeks. These lines work good now for Sun Rays and none of them had to be increased... And we also would appreciate a recent ICA client for Solaris x86! But if Citrix doesn't want, well there are other opportunities...

Posted by Hans-Juergen Neumaier on December 04, 2005 at 11:49 PM PST #

Thanks for the great info on the comparison and giving us the real "skinny" on what Sun can and can't do. I did have one question regarding your comment on attaching a scanner. What USB scanners are supported? Is there documentation on how to attach the scanner and for all users to see the device on the network. Is SANE needed? Any info would be greatly appreciated. Steve

Posted by Steve Jackson on December 06, 2005 at 04:23 PM PST #

Hi Steve,
Yes you need SANE, which we include on the SRSS Companion CD.
http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=431494c9
You also need the SUNWlibusb package from the supplemental directory of the SRSS 3.1 CD (or download). I don't do much with scanners, but will look at our internal list of tested scanners and post them.

Posted by ThinGuy on December 06, 2005 at 07:22 PM PST #

Did you test this on a LAN? It would be much more appropriate if you did WAN testing. Who cares what the banwdidth consumption on a LAN is? The Citrix 20 kbps rule of thumb is quite real, and has been used successfully for thousands and thousands of customers. Your numbers would suggest that a 1.5 Mbps T1 line could support only 5-6 Citrix users. Do you really think Citrix customers are seeing this kind of result on their MPLS, Frame, and other Wide area connections? No one would buy the software if this were true. In other words...nice try, but your methodology and understanding of this area is deeply flawed.

Posted by Citrix Guy on December 07, 2005 at 06:33 AM PST #

Hi Citrix Guy
, Cool name!
I think you are either missing my point, or helping me make it. You speak of a rule of thumb, which in plain speak really means an average. Question: Would you provision exactly 20 Kbps per Citrix user of a full screen desktop, in effect locking them to that speed? Or do you mean that on average a single published application (most likely a data entry or ERP type application), perhaps with reduced colors, no audio, etc can operate with in that average?
I'm not arquing that 20 Kbps is a false average, I'm telling the user to be wary of averages.
Given the bandwidth available today, most WAN's are operation @ LAN speed. It's not uncommon for my customers to have T3's connecting offices from the US to as far away as India with the only major difference over LAN behavior is latency.
It's also true that thin client network noise scares many Network (LAN/MAN/WAN) administrators even though it can be proven that typical PC's use more bandwidth.
Thin client protocols including ALP, ICA, RDP are very bursty but there is a low end required for a good user experience and that number is not 20Kbps.
Like your mention of 5-6 users on a T1, that's part of the problem. People buy T1's (or higher), not 20 Kbps lines so you can in effect "get away" with an average of 20 Kbps because people are "idle" for much of the day, and almost nobody is doing something at the same time.
Banks, callcenters, etc where the users are "doing something" all at once are the customers that get the raw end of that average and feel they've been lied to.
Performance is king in the eye of the end user who's PC you just replaced. Low bandwidth is great, but it has to perform, not just at a point that they can "do something", but so that don't notice that they are using a thin client.
Finally, The value of Citrix is much more than bandwidth. I'm a fan a Citrix, I'm not a fan of misleading marketing.
Let me put it this way, @ Sun with our 30K Sun Rays, we see an average of 50 Kbps but if you were to attempt to use it over a 50 Kbps line or restrict the BW to 50 Kbps it would be extremely painful.
Being an end customer would you rather hear the bandwidth required for a good user experience, or would you want to hear an average not knowing how long that average was over, what the user was doing, color depth, screen size, full desktop or single data entry application?

Posted by ThinGuy on December 07, 2005 at 08:14 AM PST #

Quote: "Let me put it this way, @ Sun with our 30K Sun Rays, we see an average of 50 Kbps but if you were to attempt to use it over a 50 Kbps line or restrict the BW to 50 Kbps it would be extremely painful." So, if the Sun Ray uses 50kbps, then it consumes 2.5 times more banwdidth than Citrix. Doesn't this confuse the point that you made before, where banwidth consumption was measured in the 200-300 kbps range? Lots and lots of Citrix customers have 56 kbps or 64 kbps frame connections (i.e. in places where banwdidth isn't nearly as cheap and plentiful as in the US) for up to 2-3 concurrent users and see quite good performance. While dial-up isn't as common any more, in the late 1990's lots of Citrix business was for dial-up and performance was quite acceptable. Like I said before, testing this on a LAN is pointless. Buy a Shunra box and simulate a real WAN, and let us know what you find out. Then we'll have a real discussion about this.

Posted by Citrix Guy on December 08, 2005 at 07:01 AM PST #

Hello again Citrix Guy,
You seem to want to turn this into a pissing contest between Citrix and Sun Ray. They are two different things and they happen t work very well together. This article is to show that people keep missing the term "average".
The Sun Ray provides a full desktop, there is no client OS to manage or to run the way typical Citrix instances are deployed. Like publishing key applications via PN Agent or hitting the web interface via a local instance of IE (both of which need to be "managed").
Answering a few other of your points:
You keep getting "averages" and required bandwidth confused. Are you telling me that if an ICA session transmits 7 MB of data over an hour it did so @ 15 Kbps the whole time? Or did it did it spike much higher and the rest of the time it was idle? How often does a single ICA session spike and consume 100% of the frame links bandwidth?
I don't need a Shunra box as I can use Dummynet. Furthermore, I don't need to simulate a WAN as we have this deployed through Sun. City offices connect to our campuses. Our call center in India connects to the US.
LAN testing is not pointless. ICA will use what you give it as will RDP and ALP. I'm not saying Sun Ray is right for dial up, but when comparing apples to apples (a full desktop doing the same tasks), Sun Ray uses about the same as Citrix when people are "working". Should I have kept the meter running while the user was idle to get a 24 hour average?
In cases where Frame/SATCOM or other real low bandwidth or high latency technologies are used, we don't do remote Sun Rays.
I've been deploying/testing/using Citrix since it was WinView, I know all about the dialup business. Acceptable with a 3.51 or NT4 GUI does not equal acceptable to a modern gui such as Luna.
You'll never understand the value of Sun Ray until you try one, let me know if I can help arrange that.

Posted by ThinGuy on December 08, 2005 at 09:18 AM PST #

I am one of the "smart guys" always wanting to know where certain figures arise from. It's just darn unbelievable how difficult it can be to get to the root of any figure. This does not only apply to Citrix's marketing snakes, but to Microsoft, IBM, Sun, heck, any marketing snake. They just get taught what to say, that's all. As Sun Ray enthousiast that's why it's very refreshing and informative to read this. Thanks heaps ThinGuy! PS. Don't get drawn in a flame war by this Citrix Guy. Untill his remarks get better to the point at least ;-)

Posted by Ronald on December 09, 2005 at 04:34 AM PST #

There is a Implementation here with 512K link , with 10 sunrays . They had user problems when they started and they are happy now after upgrading to 512K. So bandwidth is the key and there is only one application published on the SUNRAY . The Point here is tradeoff in performance with citrix in low speed links , We have seen citrix behave very badly on a 64K VSAT link and could never get Printing working . Citrix talks more about bitmap caching , which i never seen in Sunray's. So if someone comes to me and says citrix can work on 20K link , i will be happy to take him to solve this printing issue. So enough bandwidth is needed anyways if full performance is needed.

Posted by Murugan on December 10, 2005 at 08:16 AM PST #

Thanks quite intresting. I've a few clients, between them they run all three protocols. In terms of ease and out of the box setup RDP is fine, great for the odd Windows dumb terminal (nar dont mean XP boxes, lol) Citrix does seem to do a good job over slower connections, from my point of view thats its only real benefit (ie its so similiar to RDP its not worth having on a Lan). I rather like Sun Rays, simple, easy to manage, good performace and no telephone calls!

Posted by Damien Jorgensen on December 20, 2005 at 01:24 AM PST #

Good article. The question I have is around the setup of the Citrix client. Did you publish a few seamless apps (IE, Powerpoint, Excel etc) and run those simulatenously or run a full desktop from the Citrix server? In my time as a Citrix engineer I've always gone down the application presentation route and I'd suspect that the bandwidth requirements shouldn't be so great in that scenario. The other question is how much optimisation was made in the Citrix client/server configuration. The following document suggests that these can be vital in tuning the application to behave in a desirable manner. http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/616-102-139/ICA_Client_Bandwidth_Analysis.pdf Anyway, regardless its good that someone does this kind of work and posts it for the world to see, even if only to make one think a little! Kind regards Drew

Posted by Drew on December 21, 2005 at 08:37 AM PST #

You know, I guess it really comes down to what your company or customer needs. The majority of coporate American is based off a WinTel world where Sun has it place as backend services. You do not see JPMorgan/Chase, AIG, Ford, Waste Management, FedEx or many other large corporations run Sun based apps over Sun Rays. Although I think ALP has room to grow, I do not see it as a competitor to ICA or even RDP. Right now, ALP is a niche technology and has been. Until Sun, can take the Sun Rays and ALP and really show real world benefit compared to ICA and RDP, then maybe Sun will have a technology that is worth while.

Posted by Purveyor on December 23, 2005 at 08:17 AM PST #

Were in the discussion is the AIP Protocol? The adaptive internet protocol from Tarantella, bought by Sun, is not the worst according to this article: The Performance of Remote Display Mechanisms for Thin-Client Computing http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix02/full_papers/yang/yang_html/ I wonder if you could find an updated test with ALP included. And read this: ICA was originally designed for low bandwidth – and in fact does do some effective compression, that’s why Citrix recommends it instead of RDP for remote access, although it is not as modern or adaptive as Tarantella’s AIP. http://serverbasedcomputing.com/panels/answers/list3.asp?execnum=EX15550

Posted by Roland Sassen on December 29, 2005 at 11:54 AM PST #

In question about connecting scanner with RDP or ICA, we have been using remotescan (www.remote-scan.com), and it works fine. works with every sort of scanner out there and with every flavor of windows and citrix. not sure if they have a unix version, but worth looking at.

Posted by Jim Thwarps on January 24, 2006 at 09:28 PM PST #

OK, man. You are right about Citrix marketing – their engineers are squeezed out by marketing folks. No one is saying that Citrix ICA or RDP for that matter is perfect at low bandwidth however they do work with low bandwidth connections, and, guess what, an average office user does not run 1920x1200 24-bit screens over the thin pipe. There is nothing new regarding comparison of ICA and other thin clients at high color - there were very compelling tests done with VNC that performed better at high color as compared to ICA, so what? This emphasizes the fact that the right tool should be used for the right task. Any Citrix admin with a reasonable experience will tell you that for a heavy 8 hour use of Citrix connection with Office applications 50-60 kbps is sufficient with 100 additional kbps for occasional printing. And to be fare to Citrix marketing guys, they do talk about “power users” and they do mention the difference in the server load or bandwidth requirements depending on the tasks involved. A few comments about your “methodology”. When using a thin client most of the downloads go to the server and thus it does not matter – 1MB attachment or 100MB. Not sure what software you are using with your SUN environment, but the latest Microsoft Office is optimized for thin client delivery and works perfectly well at 16-bit color with much lower bandwidth requirements as compared to 200kbps+ measured within your test. Unless your office users are running PowerPoint presentation, doing commercial grade publishing with 24-bit images or watching movies, 24-bit color depth does not make sense. Also, using Internet Browser via the thin client is a bit crazy (although it is done all over the place) – you loose benefits of Browser caching and resiliency to high latency and unstable links. Well… only security reasons should compel us do it this way. About "user experience" - latency and network jitter sometimes are more irritating as compared to the lack of bandwidth. I would like to see what client you will choose when connecting from Kalahari Desert over a satellite connection. Also look at cursor accuracy which, as far as I know, is superior with ICA - try CAD software and you will see. And I will not go through the “advertisement” for Citrix client reciting the fact that it is “firewall friendly (remember SSL?)”, “has high grade encryption support”, “cross platform” and has a bunch off apps to run ;) on the server. To conclude, I would recommend running the apps in your environment locally – after all you have 250kbps+ to spare per user – why bother with thin clients? Also, check iShadow Desktop at www.ishadow.com. With this app you will be able to compare ICA, RDP and VNC (sorry, no ALP).

Posted by ALEX on February 14, 2006 at 03:51 PM PST #

After looking through your Blog, got RDP working at 3840x1200 16-bit. Thanks!!!

Posted by ALEX on February 15, 2006 at 08:55 AM PST #

"The only bad thing I can say about Citrix is that they won't wake up and smell the Java and write a recent ICA Client for Solaris x86."
Oddly enough, my opinion of SunRays is pretty similar.

Posted by Curt Cox on May 04, 2006 at 10:16 AM PDT #

Hello together,
even so it's an old entry I would like to refresh it, if possible. I have read through the "old" discussions and even so I'm a Citrix person I agree the bandwith is a minimum. But I miss something, what is with seemsless applications? Everybody is talking about Desktop access etc. but Citrix was never the Desktop, therefor you can use TS, it was around using a single application from your desktop whithout having another Desktop session to run your apps. Is there an actual comparission for the new Citrix Desktop Server or XenDesktop with the actual version of Sun Ray - I mean various things have been changed and I assume both products have advanced in usage and scalablilty in all areas?

Thanks Carsten

Posted by Carsten on February 12, 2008 at 03:59 AM PST #

You should look at Expand Networks and their plug-ins for thin protocols. The only vendor who can accelerate and compress further protocols like ICA, RDP and SunRay..and it works and fixes problems that even BW upgarde cant!

Posted by WanOP Fan on June 16, 2008 at 10:02 PM PDT #

Assuming you really did the same tasks in both setups and "ica" takes 10 minutes to complete and "alp" takes 13 minutes to complete then it's clear to me that the max bandwidth for "ica" will be higher since you pushed it more. If you finished the tasks as fast as possible on both, I would take 10 minutes "ica" over 13 minutes of "alp" any day of the week and twice on Sunday!!!

Posted by Ny Whe on July 28, 2008 at 05:54 PM PDT #

ThinGuy,

For someone that is just getting into the SunRay thing this was a great article. The example is perfect and I was just on a conference call yesterday where the discussion came up about bandwidth. This is great and keep sharing the knowledge as I will be a loyal follower.

Thanks
Rob

Posted by rob Jaudon on September 26, 2008 at 11:14 AM PDT #

[Trackback] Most VDI solutions today make use of the RDP protocol. But RDP was designed for remoting business apps, which is very different than providing an entire local desktop experience remotely. Can RDP do this? Will it need to be extended like ICA? What abou...

Posted by Brian Madden on October 28, 2008 at 02:20 AM PDT #

Thin Guy - great post and (in general) really good follow up comments.

Quick question: is ALP compressed, or would it benefit from WAN compression? Also, do you generally see folk deploy with ARC4 encryption enabled, or not?

Thinking there are opportunities to reduce the WAN impact as it appears uncompressed based on looking at info on SLIM (which is ALP by another name, correct?)

Thanks,
Steve

Posted by Steve from Singapore on November 12, 2008 at 11:18 PM PST #

Hi Thin Guy,

I like your approach to the test and your objectivity. However, I have to state that there is a flaw which you have already admitted to. Citrix and Sunray are 2 different solutions to achieve the same goal. Thin Clients. the 20 kbps claim is the AVERAGE I use when I solution a PS to a customer and it works quite well. I have customers using citrix with 20 users over a 2mbps line in Jakarta, which is to say that 2 mbps is a myth. However, it is with the understanding that we are publishing MS Word or SAP w/o audio and at 16bit colour with SpeedScreen etc. Not CAD or something to that effect.

You tested a Presentation Server against a VDI product. You should be testing Sunray against Xen Desktop. Which I think, Sunray might also prove to be superior in terms of network performance. As a VDI Sunray is very interesting, however the storage costs is quite staggering as the VDI is VMWare based.

I digress, it would be very interesting however if you were to test SSGD againsts XenApps. The network numbers will surprise you.

Good work though and an excellent reference for a thinking man.

Posted by Meraj from Singapore on January 17, 2009 at 12:42 AM PST #

[Trackback] Most VDI solutions today make use of the RDP protocol. But RDP was designed for remoting business apps, which is very different than providing an entire local desktop experience remotely. Can RDP do this? Will it need to be extended like ICA? What abou...

Posted by Brian Madden on February 04, 2009 at 10:09 PM PST #

Thanks for the data. I thought it was great. Have you ever tested stuff with Zero-Client technologies like from Wyse or Panologic. It'd be interesting to see how something like a Pano Cube (www.prosync.com) would compare to a thin client.

Posted by Nick Lessing on March 02, 2009 at 09:52 AM PST #

I am hoping someone can answer a question sort of connected to what you talking about here in a yes/no type of way. We are currently looking at the SUN thin client solution for the design offices and really would like to know how well the system would work when accessing a CAD application (Solidworks) remotely via broadband? Would it work well or is it a non-starter?

Posted by Tim Blake on April 09, 2009 at 10:58 AM PDT #

Hi Tim,
Wish I could give you a yes/no answer. If you were to say 3D and 56K I'd say no. If you were to say 2D and a couple of Mbits I'd say it would depend on how complex the drawings were.

Posted by Thin Guy on April 09, 2009 at 11:04 AM PDT #

The drawings would be a mixture of 2D & 3D the connection speed would between 6 & 10 Mbps if that helps.

Posted by Tim Blake on April 09, 2009 at 11:24 AM PDT #

Hi Tim, yes sun ray thin clients are very useful for many CAD applications. If the app uses OpenGL you can even take the rendering to a separate box with Sun Shared Visualization.

Posted by Roland Sassen on April 09, 2009 at 12:55 PM PDT #

Hi Roland,

Thank you very much for that, I have also looked at using a Packetshaper with the Sun system to improve the remote access but I shall now go off and look into your recommendation for the Sun Shared Visualisation!

Cheers!

Posted by Tim Blake on April 10, 2009 at 03:17 AM PDT #

Hi Roland, I have looked at the suggestion you made for the visualization system and I have to say that it looks perfect. Almost everything we have been searching for is there, thank you very much. The video link on the Sun page doesn’t fit the screen box though; I think their web people need to have a look!

Posted by Tim Blake on April 10, 2009 at 03:35 AM PDT #

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