Desktops without PCs

The coolest feature is something Sun calls Hot Desking, the ability for users to access their “desktop” from any Sun Ray. Workers at Sun’s Santa Clara campus, for example, can yank their Java-based smart card from their office Sun Ray and reinsert it in a tube in the cafeteria, key in a password and instantly pick up where they left off with e-mail, word processing. The device is stateless; the session is maintained on the server.

One universally tracked metric is the desktop upgrade cycle. While companies once swapped out machines every three years, today many are holding on to them for five, six or more years. But what if you could walk away from the cycle all together?

Sun, the company that loves to hate Microsoft, developed the Sun Ray as an alternative to the standard desktop and today uses 27,000 of them to run the company.

The Sun Ray is a thin client that is available as a small $360 box that you plug a monitor into, or built into flat-panel or CRT displays ($1,050 and $660, respectively). Each device has four USB ports and a smart card reader, and accesses applications on back-end servers running Solaris 8 or later. Sun says one server can support 10 to 25 users.

Because the Sun Ray doesn’t run an operating system it can access any application that runs on Solaris, and applications running on Windows, other flavors of Unix and mainframes.

In the data center each Sun Ray adds about $200 in cost, but Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Mark Tolliver expects that to drop to $50 within a year. Beyond that he is just counting the savings. No desktop churn, no moves/adds/changes and some $3.5 million per year in power savings – Sun Rays use 11 watts vs. 100 to 120 for a PC.

But the coolest feature is something Sun calls Hot Desking, the ability for users to access their “desktop” from any Sun Ray. Workers at Sun’s Santa Clara campus, for example, can yank their Java-based smart card from their office Sun Ray and reinsert it in a tube in the cafeteria, key in a password and instantly pick up where they left off with e-mail, word processing, etc. The device is stateless; the session is maintained on the server.

Hot Desking gave rise to an internal Sun program called iWork to support Sun’s nomadic workforce. Instead of dedicating offices to workers, now employees can show up at one of Sun’s many facilities, log on to search for available offices and plug in.

The goal is to have 1.8 people per office, Tolliver says. “Why heat, clean and cool offices if they are often unused?” The 4-year-old program is said to be generating about $70 million per year in savings.

Sun is pushing Sun Ray at schools and government accounts, among other vertical markets, but this simpler architecture might have broader appeal.