Germany and the Netherlands
In Germany, where I happen to live for the moment, thin clients and
ultra thin clients are bad things.
That means, according to the German Wikipedia: (my translation)
typical thin client operating systems are based on Linux, Windows CE,
Windows Embedded Standard (Win32) oder Windows Embedded 7 and are
secured against user and virus by a no-wright access filter.
Pro: by providing konfiguration-images to the thin clients, managment
and costs are reduced.
Pro: 20% less energy
Pro: eol 7 years, a PC 3-4 years
Contra: Graphical applications cannot be used in a usefull manner
Contra: most applications are made for fat clients
Contra: often license issues make it forbidden to run many applications
on a server or make
its use very expensive
Contra: cannot be used without a network
Zero Clients (we would call this an Oracle Sun Ray)
These belong to the group of thin clients.
These have a limited function and a simple primitive and more or less
secure managment
For a customer this is a vendor lock-in solution, and they have a very
limited Firmware (128 MB)
Ultra Thin client
also called dumb client
is a program or computer just to display data.
Therefore the ultra thin client is a further reduction of a thin client.
It can be a device to be used as an information terminal, with
Info-pages, other functions are not possible.
A web-browser would be a thin client, not an ultra thin client.
In (my) practice, many thin clients customers (Wyse and HP 70%) are not
happy with their solution.
Bad performance is issue nr. 1
No sound and multimedia is nr. 2
Service and support is very very very expensive is also nr. 1
In Germany and the Netherlands when people hear thin client they
associate this with
a limited use and bad performance. They say no thanks.
Here it is easier to sell a cloud computer (what is that?) than a thin
client.
It took me 3 years to convince the administration of the Dutch school of
my children to buy a Sun Ray system.
They are very happy now.
So the market is there.
Roland
On 25-10-2010 19:57, Craig Bender wrote:
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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