On Tuesday 23 August 2005 12:54, Per Jessen wrote:
Jerry Westrick wrote:
Ahhh the Sun-Ray thin clients... I'm also impressed with these but...
They are not real X-Windows clients, instead they are something closer to vnc thin-clients, as they only paint display buffers sent to them via a SUN proprietary protocol. The machines sun-rays cost about 100$ ea. but the client license for the sun proprietary server is another 100$ ea, even when running on linux (which I think they offer), plus cost of server, plus...
Looks like the newer Sunrays are up to $1k a piece now. http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_C P&catid=121968
Looks pretty slick too though.
Pricewise, they're $359 without monitor, which isn't too bad, given that the server software is free - AFAICT. http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=41c758f9
The ones that are not built into the LCD monitors are a better deal. (Cheaper, pick your own monitor, etc.) We're considering SunRays at work. It appears to work similar to NX by packing multiple pixel rendering requests and eliminating X round trips. The downside is that it is a proprietary protocol and it looks like Sun wants to be the only source for the razor and the razorblades. On the good side, it is fairly inexpensive, there is a server that runs on Linux (though, the last time I checked it wasn't as current as the solaris version), and the SunRay system supports I/O to memory cards and USB devices connected to the SunRay.