http://sun.systemnews.com Workstation http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/128/5/workstation/20787 Sun recently introduced Sun Ray Software 4 10/08 with enhanced multimedia playback capabilities on the Sun Ray 2 family of clients for H.264 (MPEG4) and VC-1 (Windows Media Video 9) streams using Windows Media Player on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This is an optimal solution for server resource conservation and network bandwidth consumption, ideal for corporate communications and training videos. Also released with this announcement is the Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/128/4/workstation/20750 Sun Ray Software is a secure, cost effective solution that delivers a rich, virtual Windows, Linux or Solaris OS desktop to Sun Ray clients. Some of the leading features of the software are its enriched multimedia abilities, flexibility, and being VDI ready. Weblogs have been focusing on the new release, and many are optimistic about the future of Sun Ray technology. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/128/1/workstation/20630 The Sun Ultra 24 Workstation is the first Sun workstation in more than 20 years to feature an Intel processor, as well as the first ever with both a quad core processor and PCI-Express Gen2 graphics bus that supports top-end NVIDIA graphics. With the best of Sun, Intel and NVIDIA under its cover the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation is one of the highest-performance single-socket workstations on the market. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/4/workstation/20514 The optimization of secure desktop virtualization provided by Sun: Why Thin Clients Aren't Interesting, What We Learned from TV, What Customers Ask For, Case Study, and Other options. "This is really about enterprise business strategies…When we move them away from the end user device and back into the enterprise, we increase uptime, performance, control and security around those enterprise assets." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/workstation/20453 Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager connects users of Sun Ray clients to Windows virtual machines via the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). It provides a Sun Ray kiosk session that allows users to connect to their virtual machines. The kiosk session prompts the user for their Active Directory user name and password. Then the user is shown a list of available desktops, or is logged directly into the desktop if there is only one available. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/2/workstation/20388 The Sun Ultra 24 Workstation by Intel with the Core 2 Duo E7200 Processor that is XATO compliant, with its 1TB disk drive, provides storage for increasingly larger data sets. It broadens the processor speed offerings and price points for the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/workstation/20094 The Sun Ray Remote Control Toolkit (RCT) is a set of scripts developed by a community that takes advantage of the open source tools to provide administrators of Sun Ray servers a set of tools that can help exceed the remote control functions of other systems with multiple users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/workstation/20354 In a blog Daniel Cifuentes developed a script that he coined “A USB Drive daemon for Sun Ray Sessions (V2)”. Cifuentes was hoping to capture the reader interested in better presenting USB disks via the Sun Ray platform, or users of version one, which Daniel previously blogged. The first version allows users to see thumb drives and other drives attached to Sun Ray on JDS/CDE/Windows. The new version of this implementation includes many more features. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/workstation/20190 Wanting to show off the capabilities of the Sun Ray 2 with the embedded VPN feature to customers requiring wireless networking, Frank Wickham devised a series of steps that enabled the Sun Ray as the users wished, which he reports in his security blog. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/workstation/20216 ZDnet columnist Paul Murphy looks at the cost of acquiring 1000 desk top systems in a recent blog post, “Costing Sun Ray vs Wintel“. He compares the Sun Ray thin client to a popular low-cost Dell desk top and concludes that the hardware costs are lower for the Sun Ray solution. However, the big savings are in the lower costs of administration and the lower power consumption (8 watts + screen for Sun Ray vs 180 watts + screen for Dell Optiflex 755).