Sun Missing Opportunity

Introduction

Is Sun and/or one of their partners missing a business opportunity by not marketing the Sun Ray for the home consumer market?

If you have a look at the Sun Ray website, they are marketing the Sun Ray to

“cost-sensitive environments such as call centers, education, health care, service providers, and finance”

These are all very valid (and easy) markets where the Sun Ray is a perfect fit. I would also contend that the home consumer market could have the potential to be much larger than the combination of all of the above areas. Having listen to Sun's CIO Bill Vass and others, it seams Sun would like to make Sun Ray's a consumer product, much like a mobile phone, where services are based within a service providers data center. While I think this is the ideal approach, I think they need the Sun Ray's in the house with a local based server, and let people get used to the benefits of the Sun Ray over a PC, before the general public will be ready to fully utilize a provider based Sun Ray service.

PC vs Sun Ray

You maybe wondering what are the benefits of the home user. Surely that cost of a Sun Ray, combined with the cost of a server (which is most likely very similar to the desktop PC you are going to purchase anyway) will be more expansive. Yes, I can see a problem here if the average house only has one computer. The problem now is like televisions, and telephones the ratio of 1 per house is changing to 1 per person or greater.

Ok, so your probably now thinking we should put a PC in the lounge room, and a PC or laptop in every bed room, that should satisfy that need for todays household. Yes, if people can afford this configuration, this is what is being done. What is wrong with this, it seems like a natural progression? Well yes it is, and Bill Gates, Dell/HP etc, and your energy supplier just loves the idea. For every extra PC you add to the household, you are adding an extra unit of the problem(s) to the equation. Every common PC requires a windows license (usually hidden in the cost of the hardware - Microsoft tax), hardware acquisition or turn-over cost (usually 3-4 years), software acquisition, installation and maintenance costs/time, viruses etc etc etc. Plus if that not enough, every PC (not including the monitor) use the equivalent power of a flood-light, or 2 if you turn the air conditioner on. Sounds very similar to typical data center issues, just on a smaller scale and budget.

So what so good about a Sun Ray, and how would it be any benefit in the home?
Ahh, from such a question it has shown you have never used one. Not only does the Sun Ray greatly reduce the above problems for every device added, but you also receive many more benefits over using a PC.

The benefits of Sun Rays are many so I will use a list -

• A Sun Ray 1 running full tilt may use 11 watts of power. The new Sun Ray 2 is around 4 watts. One day they may make a wind up version – just joking :-)


• Sessions are server based and mobile. This means you can go to any desktop in the house, put in your card and you have your desktop the way you just left it. No need to wait from the operating system to boot. No need to shutdown when you finish. No need to log out it is always there. Unless you have used a Sun Ray like this, you probably will not fully understand the magic of this feature. A good consumer example of this, is where you are listening to the radio via the internet, in your bedroom through your 2 watt low-fi speakers. Your favorite song comes on and you want to blast the house with it using the hi-fi in the lounge room. Easy, just take your card from the Sun Ray in your bedroom, and go put it in the Sun Ray in the lounge room and you can now listen to it as loud as you want... The session just follows you.


• Sun Ray turn-over time is 2-3 time less than a PC. The major changes are on the server, and upgraded the server benefits the whole family. The Sun Ray device, may never need to be upgraded. The plastic case might corrode away first.


• One server, 1 Operating system License (though you can run multiple on the one server if you use vmware, xen etc). If the OS is Solaris (you can also use Linux), it is free. Yes free, just download it. You may need some legacy windows applications. With OS vitalization software you can run windows along side your Sun Ray Server OS on the one server. You will need to pay for the windows license of course.


• One place to install applications, which the whole household can use. Parents can limit what can be installed and used by their children.


• Sun Ray's as well as functionally cool, they are also literally cool. They use very little power, therefore they don't add very much temperature to the room.


• Sun Ray's have no moving parts.... No Fans, No Disks, No noise!!!!! Put the noisy server somewhere where you wont hear it.


• Sun Ray's don't store data and don't get viruses. If you run a copy of Windows for legacy applications, you still run the risk (and cost).


• Again Sun Ray's don't store data. Put it on the server, where the whole family can share the capacity. Get rid of the usual desktop problem where 1 PC will have lots of free disk space, and another is running out and requires additional disk space. A better solution is to combine the disks in the server (using zfs on OpenSolaris of course), and use the capacity of all the disks before you need to upgrade. Parents also have the ability of soft limiting disk space used, and monitoring what their children are storing. Note: The Sun Ray can access USB devices such as memory sticks to store data.

Ok, enough of the benefits, while there is more, to be fair here is a list current Sun Ray issues -

• Yes one server (you can have an active-active fail-over if you want). Everybody shares the CPU/Memory resource, therefore they can impact on each other. With CPU and memory capacity of todays hardware, this along with operating system controls is not the problem it was in the past. The biggest CPU hog for a Sun Ray environment, is video, and with directions of multi-core CPU's this will not be a problem.


• 3D graphics. As 3D graphics are done in software on the server, the Sun Ray's are a bad platform for games which relies on 3D hardware. Currently, if you have a Xbox, or Playstation use these instead. 2D graphic applications (including games) are ideal for the Sun Ray.

Sun Ray Server

Lets address the issue of needing a Sun Ray Server. Right, yes an integral part of the equation, and this is where the major cost is involved. The CPU or CPU's/cores will need to be more powerful than a single user PC. It will need more memory, and extra disk capacity. Though people just are not utilizing the capacity of the PC's being purchased today. With multi-core CPU's, they have enough capacity for the entire household. Both memory and disks are now very cost effective, and if you take out expensive graphics card etc, it is possible to around the same price as a common PC.

Issues for Sun to Over-come

Now, that we know Sun Ray's can be more cost effective and convenient than PC's in the household, what does Sun need to make them into a household appliance. Well to be frank, nothing other than initial cost of the device. The price advertised for a single unit is much too high for the household. The current markets they target, would never actually pay this, as they would negotiate this price. Most of Sun's products are marketed for the enterprise, and the advertised prices usually mean you would never pay any more than this amount. Talk to your sales-rep.

If Sun made a Sun Ray Server for the consumer market, they would have to change their mindset from enterprise server production into a consumer product, much like their defunct Cobalt Cube. Generally in the household you don't have a Unix System Administrator around to install and maintain the device. A consumer Sun Ray Server appliance will need to be similar to configure and maintain as a DSL modem.

Sun currently has many, many features in Solaris such as ZFS, zones/containers,
resource management, trusted Solaris, BrandZ (and soon xen) as well as products as Sun Secure Global Desktop Software which could be leveraged to build a pre-configured, dumbed down consumer product. They just need to use some of their R&D budget.

Why has nobody else looked at this?

I think Sun is the only company with the Vision, R&D, and product line to be able to do this. Most consumer companies which sell PC's now, use off the self components to put them together. Therefore no R&D, no software etc. Dell??? well “Dell by name and Dull by nature”, they lack R&D, software and ideas. They would need somebody else to do it for them, and they would then sell it. They are distributers not creators. HP like Dell, would prefer to not rock the PC boat, and have been progressively avoiding the need for R&D. IBM??? They have just sent the PC boat to China, probably it was getting in the way of Global Services. Microsoft – Nahhh, not likely. Sun is probably the only company with all the egg's in the basket, and currently not locked into the Wintel PC market, that could set a new direction which finally would phase out the horrible Personal Computer from the home.