By Peter Castle, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems SA
We use appliances such as TV sets and kettles daily without thinking twice. Appliances are just there, easy-to-use and manufactured to please.
Imagine your desktop having the same characteristics. A solution that is more like an appliance - user-friendly and reliable - which does not require users to be part-time IT administrators, yet gives them everything they need to do the job.
That's what the Sun Ray Hot Desk Architecture delivers. It provides all the functions of a desktop but without the computer on your desk. It's a server. And works like an appliance.
Like an appliance? Yes, users get the power of a server right on their desktops - instantly. And what is even more significant is that there is no client administration or desktop upgrades needed, ever.
End-users, therefore, get instant access to their favourite applications, with rich multimedia features such as CD-quality audio, while the system administrator manages everything on a server in the back room.
And the most exciting part? The Sun Ray Architecture's 'Hot Desk' feature. It allows users to access their individual computing sessions - exactly where they left off - from any appliance in the workgroup.
Students don't, for example, have to save their work when the bell rings. They can simply stand up, move to the next class and resume working where they left off, on another appliance.
In other words, the work resides on the server, not on a specific desktop and comes up instantly with the insertion of a smart card or password.
The Sun Ray Hot Desk Architecture is amazingly cost-effective. It offers very low cost per seat. All organisations have to do is run one copy of the operating system (OS) on the server. And no changes need to be made to a company's applications or its back-end infrastructure.
It's clear. Sun Microsystems' Sun Ray shows that computing can indeed be simple, friendly and cost-effective.
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