Paul Roberts' Musings

Monday June 13, 2005

Let the SunRay shine

This isn't just corporate but-kissing: I really love the SunRay technology. For those who don't know, the SunRay is a very thin client which effectively works as a remote display for a session running on a high-powered shared server. I use one everyday at work and I love being able to pull my smartcard out of the device and travel to a different building (even a different town), plugin the card and have my session appear immediately on the screen as if I'd never left it. This ability particularly comes into its own for me because I split my working week between two different offices in different towns. Regardless of where I am I get the exact same work environment and can seemlessly shift from one office to the other and pick up exactly where I left off.

This technology would be so useful in any environment where large numbers of computers are shared. Besides the advantages offered to the system administrators (SunRay's themselves don't require maintenence: if they go wrong you just replace them entirely, which is easy to do as they are stateless) they are extremely convenient for the users. So many times when I was at university, making use of the shared lab there, did I wish we were all kitted out with SunRays instead of the standalone PCs, because often we would have to move from one area of the lab to another chasing the free machines as those we were on got booked up during the day. Its also a great way for people to feel some kind of ownership over thier use of shared computing resources, because you now that your session is yours, and it follows you wherever you go. Great stuff.

Tentative beginnings

Like many of my colleagues here at Sun I have finally committed to finding my voice and beginning a blog here on blogs.sun.com. I have been blogging externally for some time now (in fact, since before I joined Sun) and I intend to continue to maintain that blog with more personal items (for example, much of it is in Esperanto; I will try and stick to a single language in this blog!). This area, while no doubt still containing the odd personal observation, will be more closely linked to whatever work I happen to be doing here at Sun.

So far I have a relatively short but exciting history in the company. I joined Sun for the first time in 2001 as an intern, where I worked as a lab engineer in the PTS lab team (frequenters to this site my recognise that Paul Humphreys manages and frequently blogs about this team and their work: while I was student he was my manager).

After returning to university and completing my degree I returned to Sun just over a year ago (March 2004) to work in the revenue product engineering group. Our core responsibiliy in this team is to fix customer escalated bugs in Sun's products. In addition, we have many other contributions to Sun's software group, which you can no doubt read more about here in the coming months and in the many other RPE blogs out there.

I am currently in the utilities group (which deals with many userland Sun products) specialising in the N1 product range, and it is in this space that most of my work has been done to date. This includes working on Sun's contribution to the service provisioning market, N1 Service Provisioning System, as well as a few other datacenter focused products.

I will soon be transitioning to the security coordination team, so I anticipate that in the future this blog will gradually adopt a more security-related focus as I find my feet and become more at home in that area.