I was asked to help out at the LISA conference that was held last week in Baltimore, MD. I won't waste your time with the subjects that I was asked to present - though I may follow up with an interesting demonstration that we put together. No, the highlight for Sun Ray was saving a fat client from near collapse on the exhibition floor. One of the demonstrators in the Sun booth was planning to showcase the amazing analytics of our open storage platform using a VPN connected laptop. Basically, the plan was to VPN in to Sun where he could then connect via RDP to a demonstration system up and running in a lab. The problem with the plan was that the network inside and from the hotel was absolutely horrible.
So, what do you do when you are relying on the network for the lion's share of your demonstration and it is an absolutely dog? Remove the fat client from the picture and insert a 100% network based computer? Well, that is just what we did. We replaced the high end laptop with a Sun Ray 270. From there we leveraged the VPN capabilities of the device to connect back in to Sun. Once connected, we launched the Windows Connector to his demonstration machine and .... presto, the demo was a success. The performance of the Sun Ray device was head and shoulders above the week performance turned in by the VPN connected laptop due to the use of the ALP protocol. The adaptive nature of the protocol proved its worth adjusting to congestion on the network and delivering a snappy desktop experience.