The Balance of Desktop and Life
Well a long time between blogs but it's just been a busy end and start of the year. Between work and home life it's getting a bit ridiculous but it's all good. Just bought a house and am in the middle of renovating it, and then getting married in October so it's all happening.
Lately my time has been spent working on many Desktop product Proof of Concepts and Deployments around Australia and New Zealand and I have others queued up to be worked on, and there seems to be a buzz about Sun and it's products from both our customers and internally.
In my customer base I am hearing that some of our competitors have some really nice stories (on paper that is) but the good thing is once we go head to head with their products, and customers see that within days our products working in their environment they are always swayed to Sun. There is a difference between marketing and actually doing something.
Also other Vendors are integrating VmWare's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) into their Solutions. Good news is that Sun has available for download (on Sun's download site a Virtual Desktop Access Kit to be able to integrate Sun Ray and Secure Global Desktop with VDI and get secure remote access to your VDI sessions. This is an excellent solution when some of a customers applications don't lend themselves to run on a Terminal Services environment. Each person still has their own PC, but with SGD and Sun Ray they can have access to it anywhere in the world.
One can integrate Sun Desktop products into their customers environments and can show them Secure Global Desktop integrated with Active Directory or LDAP as an authentication mechanism, and then centralising their application deployment to their users, role based access and deployment of applications, publish Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mainframe and AS400 applications and desktop, and out-of-the box also setting up Secure Remote Access out of the box, and access to their desktop applications from any Java enabled browser in the world. Then also showing mobility with Sun Ray hot-desking technology where they can access their desktops via any Sun Ray in the organisation by inserting their smartcard.
Then Sun also has a best of breed Identity Management solution which integrates into Secure Global Desktop and Sun Ray, and setup Single-Sign-On and adding users to all the different back-end systems with just filling in one webform.
Then you could integrate it all into Sun Java Enterprise Portal Server and give portal access to applications, email, calendar and other information.
So, on the same infrastructure you can host your environment, your suppliers environment and your customers environment. Then the subscription pricing available on our Java Enterprise System software products, so you have a predictable cost structure year after year, and also get access to all the software you require, it's just a total compelling story. We are one of the only IT Vendors int he world who can offer end to end solutions with our own products, and each product is fantastic in it's own right.
I put it to any customers out there, if you are looking at thin client technology make sure you download the products off of the Sun website and try them out. Don't take my word for it, take your own.
We also chatted the other day with colleagues of mine from a Sun partner, that if for example a Partner who resells Novell products, goes into their SuSe customers, took the SuSe desktop managed by ZenWorks, installed Sun Ray Server Software on SuSe then within an hour, plug in Sun Ray's into the network, and there you have it... a Thin Client solution. Plus they could also use Sun Secure Global Desktop to remotely access not only Windows applications but also Linux applications remotely and securely. You could do the same with Red Hat. Anyways something to think about.
With Citrix and basically any Windows Thin Client out there, they completely lock you into a Windows environment, and Secure Global Desktop and Sun Ray gives you choice, especially with the software back ended by Sun X64 servers that support Windows, Linux and Solaris, maybe you are running a Windows environment for the next few years, but then on that same infrastructure you can move to an open source desktop without having to buy more.
Some argue that they run no operating system on their thin client, but they all run an Operating system of some flavour or another (Linux, Proprietary Thin OS, WinCE, Windows Mobile, Win XP Embedded, Windows NT Embedded and many others) , which maybe small but still an OS that needs to be managed and patched. On a Sun Ray the OS (which is on the other Thin Clients firmware) is on the server which is managed on the server. Some of the thin clients specifications out there resemble a PC (some have more memory and faster CPU than one of my desktops at home!!) but all they do is replace the hard drive with flash memory. I find it's ridiculous to have different model thin clients all with different OS options, different hardware options, different peripheral options, why not just stick with a PC. Sun Ray is soooo simple, one Sun Ray model in three form factors, which you can Run Solaris, Windows, SuSe, and Red Hat.
Anyways that's it for now hopefully I can start blogging a bit more.
Cyaz, Maurice
Posted at 03:53PM Mar 01, 2007 by sunraybruce in General |