Direct Access

Direct Access Transcript
Sun Ray Thin Client Computing
Bill Vass, Chief Information Officer

John Gage: Bill Vass, you're Sun's Chief Information Officer; that means you're at the core of everything that makes Sun work, and you're all over the world. I want to find out how you work, because you go into an office in Paris, into an office in London, into an office in California, to your home. You go to airports, you go around the world, and yet you always respond to your e-mail instantly; how do you do this, and how do you stay linked globally into Sun?

Bill Vass: Well, I do it with a combination of technologies, John. One of them is our service oriented architecture and Web Services that enables me to work on any device. Another one is, of course, our Sun Ray technology, which works whenever I'm at home or within a Sun infrastructure to conveniently deliver my desktop state wherever I happen to be.

JG: Well, now, this is a grid of multiple servers, pushing a display to a screen.

BV: That's right.

JG: So you could call it a display grid, if you wanted.

BV: That's absolutely correct. In fact, we link that grid into our enterprise applications and others so we can share the capabilities that are on the CPUs there with both data centers and Web servers and other things like that, along with our desktops, so that we get maximum utilization of those CPUs.

JG: Well, now, here we've got one.

BV: That's right, and so what you see here is I have put my badge in here, which I'll show you how this works, and when I pull my badge out...

JG: This is you.

BV: This is me, and it's a combination of physical and cyber access together, right, so it's a very strong authentication. It's got my picture on it, so you know it's me, right? So it's very strong authentication. When I walk up to a Sun Ray [system], I insert my badge, and you'll see, it'll go out, it'll go over the network, it'll find my desktop and change to my channel. Now, I didn't enter a PIN in because I disabled that for the sake of this demonstration; for me, having put my PIN in all the time, but normally...

JG: But you could have any authentication, including many levels...

BV: Including biometrics and other things like this. And so what I brought up here is using our Tarantella software, I'm running Internet Explorer with Windows; you can see the familiar Windows environment. But this is actually a subset within multiple desktops that I have here. If you can imagine a world where you never, ever log out, which is the way I live my life. I pull my badge out here, I go home and I put my badge in; within three seconds my desktop is at home. And just like changing a channel, you would need many desktops, so I can jump between many desktops. Think of this as booting Windows each time I do this, right?

JG: It's always running, it never stops. JG Gage: It's always running, it's always running in the background. You can see, here's my phone is integrated on this as well.

JG: But in the day to day processing of your life, you're in a meeting, and you suddenly find, though you're a mile from your office, that you need to do something, what do you do?

BV: So I have a number of ways to access that. So what I can do is I can borrow any machine anywhere. I'll give you an example. My wife's shop is all Macintosh, and when I go to work there, because we have a parent-teacher conference, I'll just go to any machine anywhere; within a few seconds I can bring my work environment up through the Macintosh and do virtually anything I can do here at work. I can do presentations, I can access things--and this is all done through Visual Web Services. And then I can re-route, using our soft phone client, which is sitting right over here; I can access that because that's all Java, it runs right on top of her Macintosh as well. I can re-route my phone right to the desk phone that's sitting next to me. When I'm not on those areas, what I can do is simply pull my cell phone out, and through Visual Web Services, I can access my e-mail, I can access enterprise applications right here on this device. You can see all of my mail right here on this device. But this will work on any device, it's not unique to this. I like devices with keyboard. I can even pull video down on this and other things like that. So if I'm taking a very long trip, I can check out a laptop and synchronize my environment onto it if I need to.

JG: Now, tell me about the energy costs and the overall lifetime financial costs. How do you model what this might do to a large organization? Say I have 10,000 employees. How could you change my life by bringing this technology to bear on my problem?

BV: Well, first of all, there's a number of different ways to look at the advantages. There's a number of software organizations who've deployed these at [their employees' homes]. And the reason they've deployed these at home is so they're not sending their intellectual property home. For instance, Sun's call center, which is in Mombai, India, runs entirely on thin clients, and the servers are in Mechanicsburg, PA. So we don't send any intellectual property to India; they just see it and interact with it.

JG: They see the bits of the screen.

BV: Yeah, they see the bits of the screen, and you can't get two places on earth that are farther apart than Mombai, India and Mechanicsburg, PA. So you can do it over very long hauls if you need to do that. So for executive support and other things like that, and developers who need access at home to a wide range of things, the Sun Ray [system] is a very secure solution. So it'll save you a lot of money in that perspective. Call centers work extremely well with Sun Rays because you're hot desking there, and when you integrate the phone in with it eventually, that becomes a really high value proposition, and then the ability to send people home with it.

So as we start to look at the deployments, our big savings, really, go around several things. First of all. you don't refresh it. We haven't upgraded our desktops at Sun in almost seven and a half years now. And a lot of companies can [benefit from] that. So when you look at the cost of this, you don't look at the one or two year PC life span; you look at it like a TV set or an LCD projector; how often do you upgrade those, right? You're looking at a seven to 12 year life span. I think they come with a five year warranty, something like that, and so we expect them to last a long time. There's no moving parts, there's no fans.

The next area that's a huge savings is just patching and upgrading. I can upgrade a new windowing system at Sun on all 33,000 desktops in six hours, at a total labor cost of $10,000. Used to cost me about four to five millions dollars in labor. Not the costs of the machines and the cost of the software, and about 18 months of time.

Another big savings is these things just don't get viruses. Now, your server could still get a virus, but servers--we have a very small number of servers, compared to the clients, and they're managed by people in white coats in lab rooms who know what they're doing, not by end users, right, so they're very easy to defend, comparably speaking.

Another big area, as you mentioned, is power savings. These only use, on average, 11 watts as opposed to our 100-300 watt desktops we used to have before. You know, it adds up to almost three million dollars a year in power we save, when you add that in. When we refresh things, we're only refreshing the server, so unlike the PC world, where we used to throw the desktops into the landfill and pay for recycle charges and all those other things, we don't do that anymore. So there's a huge environmental impact by going to a Sun Ray [system]--lower power, less landfill issues, less recycle issues, all those things.

And another big deal is moves, adds, and changes. That's always a big thing for Sun, for any company that has to add a new employee, or when an employee moves from one place to another. Some companies spend as much as $1,700 per move.

JG: How much does this cost?

BV: Our real numbers--and we'll look at it again over a five to seven year timeframe, because that's the life span of these devices--they aren't the two to three years that people are used to. It ends up being about one-seventh the cost of an average Windows XP deployment.

JG: All things considered...

JG: The server, the network cost, the power savings, refresh rates, moves/adds and change—you have to make sure you include all of the real costs. For example, virus fighting. I lot of times I ask people, so why do you have these 60 people to fight viruses? Those are the kinds of things they tend to often not include that are very important in the real costs of managing an environment. And I think once we get the voice over IP working on this as well, the eliminating of the PBX management and the phone management and the moves for the phones, all of those things, that makes it even more attractive. That's not working yet, but we're working very hard on it. We've got some pilots running to enable that. So I think those are some pretty exciting things, as you move forward on that. So--and the device cost can run between--it depends upon volume, right, the higher the volume, the lower the cost--in the $200 range to fancy ones like this, for the $600-700 range, because you're paying for the nice LCD and other things like that. The server side costs will run something on the order of, for the CPU infrastructure, around $30-40 per user, in that range. The entry cost may be very similar to PC environment; when you look at it over seven years, it's significant savings.

JG: Bill Vass, Chief Information Officer for Sun Microsystems, thank you very much.

BV: Thanks, John, it's been a pleasure being here.