The "Life Of Reilly" at Sun Jeff Reilly's Blog Spot

I was preparing for a customer meeting and decided to test our newest VDI 3.0 demonstrator with a Gobi 8 Sun Ray Laptop.  
I figured I would need to be connected at the customer site to a external network so I decided to use my AT&T HDSPA 3G Wireless Aircard with the Gobi 8.
In order to get to our internal VDI 3 demonstrator I needed to use our IPSec VPN gateway as well.      So after connecting I was presented with our VDI login and desktop selection screens. I tested bringing up OpenSolaris and Ubuntu desktops hosted on a VirtualBox desktop provider.  I then tested using Windows XP on a VMware VSphere desktop provider.  Sun VDI 3.0 allows customers to have desktops on different providers (Hypervisors) at the same time and allocated to specific users.  This means my user ID can have multiple desktops on different desktop providers supported by Sun VDI 3.

After logging in on the Windows XP desktop I noticed we had our Sun Ray Multimedia redirection components installed and a few sample videos.   I wondered
how the Sun Ray Multimedia Redirection would perform over 3G wireless and a VPN encrypted gateway.  To my surprise I found it pretty darn good so I took this video to share.  Please check it out.  Sun Ray and it's protocol really shine in long distance connections to VDI environments.

Sun has It right at VMworld 2008[Read More]

Sun ROCKS! at VMworld with VDI and xVm Virtualization.  Come check it out

Being Irish with a splash of Welsh I always like the conversations and beer at my local brew pub (That happens to be near home).  I always end up talking tech and am surprised at how far people have come.  I recall getting blank stares as I talked about computers and the internet.  Now it is a common dialogue.  Only hurdle i get now is when I talk JAVA they think Starbucks. Of course these are local Schooleys Mountain Folk. I of course switch to Sun Micro and get a 20 percent recognition rate.

The fun part is when I talk Desktop Virtualization and the idea of paying a subscriber fee for a telephone like appliance that delivers Windows. The reaction is mostly WHEN? How Much? I hate fixing my PC!

So the moral of this short post is that Beer, JAVA and Microsoft can make good bar buddies! Imagine if we monetized it to the masses. Time for another Porter (After hours of course)

When it comes to blogging I have suffered from analysis paralysis trying to decide on what tools to use, what to write that matters, and who would really read it anyway.  Finally I have decided to just write, figure it out as I go and suffer the consequences.

So today is my first post and it comes from Chicago's O'Hare Airport (ORD).   I just spent last evening doing demo and booth duty at a customer sales conference for the midwest region.   This is for one of our largest partners (and customer) in the communications industry.  In the short planning time we had the Sun sales rep wanted to figure out what to show them and what would be a good message.

I of course pushed one of my passions, network computing and desktop virtualization.    This means of course Sun Ray Ultra Thin Clients and Sun Secure Global Desktop integrated together in a demo that shows application and desktop publishing over any network (Wifi, 3G, Wired) to any device (Well almost any device, but certainly the one that matters....  a browser)

The customer sales reps ate it up when they saw the demo concept of a appliance running over their network driving network demand, pushing services from their Data Centers to subscribers.  They loved the idea of accessing their desktop anywhere on the network.   

With constant network proliferation and ever growing bandwidth they see the "disconnected" mode of computing as less of a issue.  One customer rep said that when he powers on his laptop, if he does not have network connectivity he is not interested in what he can do.  I agree.   I may spend 5% of my time working on a laptop without network access.   That is a big change from 5 years ago.  Right now I am in a Chilis connected to a 3G data service using a Aircard writing a blog as I drink coffee.  Timewarp back 5 years and this would only be capable for the highly paid execs with little budget restraint.

The other area of huge interest was security.  The notion of removing data and application management from thousands of "roaming" laptops is a huge benefit across all industries struggling with compliance and cost of administration (This includes admin staff,  Software mgmt. OS mgmt, hardware mgmt, help desk staff, help desk tools, etc...)  

At one point we had people layered 5 deep watching our demo and the areas of benefit just kept growing and growing as the customer reps focused on their customer industries.  What a great success and way to spend 4 hours in Chicago (Outside temp of -9 degrees)

So to end this post my take away is network computing with network accessible desktops and services in the Web 2.0 era are here.  When everyone sees it, they relate to it and always say... "Thats Cool"

Do not under estimate the number of people that do not yet know about these capabilities.  If you are into this as well, keep the message going.

Thanks for reading