Hey folks,
I can't say much about about support, maintenance, being a Sun vs Oracle
reseller, or warranties. All those items and the decisions made
regarding them are far above my pay grade. I'd like to a few common
themes in this thread.
> Sun Ray is not a client -thin or otherwise
Besides the silliness of quoting pundits (regardless of how well meaning
they intend theirs words to be, or worse, those who have never once used
a Sun Ray), can someone tell me why this matters? Sun Rays have been
marketed as Ultra Terminals (the "ut" in SUNWut), Ultra Thin Clients,
thin clients, Virtual Display Clients, zero admin clients, Display over
IP devices, and a few others that I've probably forgotten. All of which
have been used in order to differentiate them from the competition,
because they truly are unique. In the end, it is just a name. It is an
interesting aside how many people tell me not to mention the "Thin
Client" word to their CIO when they bring me into talk about Sun Rays
and VDI. The fact of the matter is that very few "Thin Clients" have
actually delivered on their promise of less administrator and lower
costs. Sure, Sun Rays have been (and probably will continue to be) sold
into environments that weren't a good fit, but on the whole, they've
delivered on the thin client computing vision. I'd add that they've done
so better than any other device in it's class, but I'm a little bit biased.
> Solaris/Linux Admin availability
I always find this a silly argument. If your Administrator says they
can't figure out Solaris or Linux yet they run your ESX server, Cisco
gear with IOS, all while using a Mac, I'd look for a new Administrator.
I came to Sun as a Windows guy, and sure there was a learning curve, but
trust me, I'm not a rocket scientist.
How about start by cutting the price in half (including the support
contract), putting it back to where it's a real competitor to small,
cheap desktops or other not-so-thin clients.
Every time one of these "cut the price in half" discussions pop up, I
wonder how many who make this statement have actually brought a
computing product to market? I know it's tempting to look on the web and
compare prices to PC's, but that truly is comparing apples and oranges.
Here's the reality of pricing:
The "loss leader" PC's that you see in your Sunday paper or advertised
on the web are all basically the same. Their biggest cost is a mass
manufactured mobo, called a "reference design" created by the major chip
makers. With this design, big tech factories in China, Tawain, Mexico,
etc make these boards by the millions. In order to get really low
pricing, these boards are sold by the millions, not by the thousands or
even hundred of thousands. Look at the retail price of an iPhone, $599
for a device that has sold over 6o millions units in a few short years.
Shouldn't this device retail for a lot less? No, because the components
in them are not mass produced at a level that would allow Apple to cover
their costs and make *their* required profit. Trust me, Sun Ray profit
margins didn't pay for McNealy's hockey rink and aren't paying for
Larry's yacht.
The other problem comparing cheap PCs, and perhaps the most important
aspect of the pricing, are the various components that comprise the rest
of the PC. The "rest of the PC" is whatever happens to be the most
affordable components available as they build them to order. This is why
when you visit a Dell or HP site you're not quite sure what drivers to
download. Sure, you know the model number of your PC but you don't know
if you have DVD drive x, video card y, or card reader z when presented
with all option options. Most large enterprises don't buy the cheap PC's
because it sends their administrative costs through the roof just
maintaining them. Imagine if Oracle had to have keep updating firmware
because the audio, USB, serial, etc chipsets changed month to month.
We'd sell zero of them because updating the firmware would take as long
as installing an OS.
Sun Rays aren't like retail clothing, we are not marking them up 400%
like the outfit you are wearing. The components used in building a Sun
Ray have a lot of thought behind them, price of course is one of them. I
believe the list price of a Sun Ray 1 in 1999 was $600 and SRSS only ran
on dot com era SPARC servers. Today a Sun Ray 3 is about a 1/3 of the
original price and you can run SRSS on x86 (from Oracle, Dell, HP, etc),
a VM, or SPARC.
While we understand that price is important, our guiding design
principle has been to create an affordable low power device that is
built to last *and* provide years of usefulness. The fact that Sun Ray
1's are still being bought and sold on e-bay is a testament to this
design principle. How useful is a 10 year old PC? How many have you
bought lately? Not only do we strive for incredibly long MTBF numbers
and backwards compatibility (which I believe is the best of any
computing device ever made), we put a lot of effort into making the unit
as recyclable as possible. Not to get all "treehugger" on you, but we
are very proud of the fact that we made the Sun Ray 3 family 98%
recyclable. 180 million PCs will be replaced this year, 35 million of
which will end up in landfills creating a nightmare of toxic metals that
will cost even more to clean up in the future.
There are also certain requirements for our product that might not be
considered in a thread like this. Beyond the various certifications that
must be obtained to sell these devices to some enterprises, there are
segments of the marketplace that do penetration testing that our product
must pass. There aren't many that can pass these tests, very few in
fact. This makes the component choice of the design very important, and
the fact of the matter is that the cheapest components rarely have
security in mind.
I am curious though, how much research has actually been done regarding
other thin clients? Do you ever wonder why they have 18 models? Why they
offer different RAM options, different video card options, different CPU
options? Why do *all* other thin client vendors EOL their devices at the
same pace that Dell or HP EOL PC's? Hopefully this is a rhetorical
question and is why you are a Sun Ray customer in the first place.
If you haven't done a real pricing exercise and just are assuming
because you saw a competitors thin client for under $200, take a look at
Wyse pricing from CDW http://bit.ly/aqwT5X (Don't compare the $99 E01 in
that link, that's a direct attach PC sharing device for "Windows
MultiPoint Server".) Be sure to add on all the "extra feature" (MMR,
Management, etc) costs as well.
Once you get past the pricing, do a usability bake-off. Again, though
I'd assume you've already done that. Otherwise I'd wonder why you are on
this list in the first place.
Regards,
CB
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