Jun 28

Thin, Cool and Sexy   Posted by sharps, tagged with sunray work

Sorry if you arrived here looking for pictures of scantily clad beach volleyball players - but read on - there might be something here for you.

I've recently officially ditched my office in Santa Clara and now my assigned office is at home. In the last 7 years at Sun - I've only rarely used an office - I've always preferred the work / life balance that working from home gives me. Also, as Sun are closing some Bay Area campuses - it seemed unfair for me to be hogging barely use office space.

As part of that move, I recently installed a new SunRay 170 in my home office. If you  don't know what a SunRay is (which many don't) - it's an ultra-thin stateless client that allows me to work as if I were inside Sun's firewall (and not have to bother with overloaded VPN connections). It's also very secure (multi-level authentication) and it's stateless nature gives me a feature not found anywhere else - Session Mobility. Basically - I can pull my smart card out of the SunRay - drive to another Sun Office - put my card in and my session continues just where I left off. This is a great feature for me - I typically have 20-30 windows open over multiple vitrual desktops - and having to re-create that environment is a real pain. As an aside I tested this feature live in front of a customer this week at Sun's Executive Briefing Center.

Another awesome feature is that it generates no noise (it has no fan or other moving parts) and virtually no heat so it keeps my office much cooler than a desktop / laptop and apparently uses the same amount of electricity as a light bulb (so saves me money too).

There are still a number of things I need to figure out - occasional latency issues, mounting a USB drive, using a scroll wheel mouse, installing performancing, access to Thunderbird / Firefox - but so far, so good.