Arieh's Weblog

As a follow-on to this article about Sun Rays in technical environments, I will chime in with some of my own experience.

Many of the points Moazam makes in his article hold true for the Sun Ray systems our department uses.

About 2 years ago, our group (within the changes on campus) was asked to migrate to Sun Rays.

Our Sun Ray servers have been configured to include all of the additional stuff that comes with Solaris (/opt/sfw/*), as well NFS-mounting the development environment for our projects (which includes the JDK, the additional Java members of the 'ecosystem' that we require, as well as other software).

As expected, initially, not many developers jumped to the fray (you'll have to pry my workstation from my dead fingers ;). I was probably one of the only ones who did. After two years of having made the jump, I have gotten to appreciate the advantages of relying on a powerful multi-CPU/multi-user enterprise class server.

The machine is more powerful than the workstation I have (I still have it, but I use it as a crash machine, and it is not bothered with the overhead of hosting my window managers, browser, mail, StarOffice, etc). As a matter of fact, since the Sun Ray server is used by many colleagues, the startup time of the various application(s) is reduced.

I will add that I only have one display (I don't believe current Sun Rays support multiple displays), so that is not a problem for me..

As an aside, I will add that apart from the Sun Ray, I have my own SPARC workstation, an Intel box (running linux), a laptop (dual bootable into linux and Win2k). All four are connected to Belkin Omniview F1D104-USB KVM switch. A pretty convenient setup.