Ponder This

Tuesday January 24, 2006

Quotes from the Customer

I have recently been working with a Sun Ray customer, prepairing to expand their deployment. Over a year ago they moved Sun Rays into production at their Call Centers. Since then, as the acceptance of our solution has grown on others in the company, they have been looking at other ways to leverage Sun Ray's.

One area I mentioned, is what I call Secure Work From Home. In this case, a Sun Ray would be deployed to approved users homes and then connect back into the corporate datacenter via a Secure VPN. So, no data leaves the network and no virus's enter the network. Another area, they came up with was to deploy them in their hospitality locations as terminals for the front desk. Again, connecting across the Internet via a secure VPN. In this case there are no PC's to run and fix, if it has a hardware problem or needs to be re-imaged. It also helps when they are doing software upgrades. They just upgrade the servers and everyone is set. There is also the added benefit of an extended desktop lifecyle leveraging the 1g five year warranty.

Here are some quotes from the customer regarding their experience:

This quote was after using Secure Work From home for a couple of days

" My "Sun Ray at Home" performance has gotten "BETTER" over the past couple of days since it was installed. Last night, it was performing flawlessly ... no lags, no trails on window movement, and responses equally as fast as when I'm working on my Sun Ray at the Office .... it's even more impressive to me than when I first saw it work a couple of days ago! Even for a long-time Sun Ray advocate like me ... this is stunning thing to see how excellent it's working for me "at Home" over the VPN tunnel thru the Internet."

Well to bad for you no more snow days!

This is all without any tuning out of the box. There is a lot you can do/probably should do to smooth things out with low bandwidth deployments. Especially, if you are using a GNOME based desktop. Currently, I think there are are some sweet spots I try and focus on with the customers I engage. The example here leverages a low cost pipe both at the end users home and at the remote counter locations. In both cases, they will have a small number of seats deployed and will not need to upgrade the bandwidth into each location. As we increase the number of connections served by the datacenter, we are going to have to increase the pipe. In this case it makes sense, the cost of managing distributed systems in these locations out weighs the added cost of the bandwidth for the datacenter.