The Magic of SunRay

As a new employee at Sun Microsystems I signed up for the SunRay@Home program so I could get the same to my desktop at home that I have at work. It arrived by FedEx in a large box that included a new SunRay 270, a router, and a power strip.

I already have a fairly well equipped home office that includes uninterruptible power supplies and a gigabit LAN routed via DSL to the Internet, so I didn't even bother unpacking the router or the power strip. I just unpacked the SunRay 270 and plugged in the USB mouse and keyboard, the power cord, and an ethernet cable from my router.

When I powered it on, I was asked for a password that was supplied to me via email when I requested the unit. It did some thinking and all of a sudden, a login screen appeared asking for my username. This is the same login screen I see on my SunRay at work. Without entering anything, I inserted my Sun badge and was prompted for my screen saver password (again just as if I were at work). I entered my password and presto - my Solaris desktop appears - just as I had left it when I left work.

Now I know this is not new to the world but it is new to me. The whole idea of session portability, instant sign-on, and the security of non-local state is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I had a feeling reminiscent of the first time I saw the internet on a Netscape browser. It was like science fiction becoming real. To me it was indistinguishable from magic.

I've been in the IT business long enough to have suffered through what I now see as the morass of desktop computing. Having multiple desktop machines at work and home and a laptop and server accounts to keep in sync has always been a kludge. Plus the risk of disk failures (I have had two significant failures) and ineffective backups has always seemed so intractable.

A long time ago if you wanted an answering machine for your phone, you had to buy one and install it at your house. Then the phone companies started offered voice messaging for a nominal fee. I remember thinking what an easy decision that was. I didn't want to manage my own messaging infrastructure. Now who has their own answering machine? Not many. The same will be true for desktop computing.

Now what I need to be ultimately productive is a SunRay laptop. This should be a device that has n-wifi, speakers, microphone, camera, DVD, USB ports, gigabit ethernet (for when I'm at my desk), and a huge battery. Think a MacBook Pro without the hard drive, Intel processor, and RAM. This unit would presumably get fantastic battery life because the power sucking components are gone. And even if you did need to change the battery, you wouldn't lose any productivity because of session persistence. I would also want a battery charger and few extra batteries so I could go non-stop when I'm untethered.

SunRays are the greatest thing since sliced bread and I hope Sun can capitalize on this technology to change desktop computing for good.

Posted at 07:29AM Mar 03, 2008 by Scott Lehman in Sun  |  Comments[0]