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Case Study: Sun Rays

In early 2001, the MG&G Crustal Dynamics Group began migrating away from the traditional Sun computing model (a host on every desktop) toward a server-centered model based on the new Sun Ray ``Information Appliances''. The group's goals were:

1.

SHORT TERM: Improve performance and simplify system administration.

a. The Sun Ray model isolates each cluster of appliances on a private subnet, and consolidates all primary disk and/or tape drives on the server. This allows every user to enjoy ``local disk access'' (i.e. the majority of i/o operations are for disk and tape access on the local system bus), which we have found to be the single most important factor in determining overall performance.

b. The Sun Ray appliances themselves (i.e. the box that sits on each user's desktop) are ``zero administration'' and require no software or hardware maintenance. At a cost of about $300 each, they are essentially throw-away items.

2.

LONG TERM: Reduce computing costs.

a. Fewer and fewer applications, especially science applications, are being developed and/or supported for Sun/Solaris (and Unix in general). In the past year alone, ArcView GIS, GM-SYS, ERMapper, and others have abandoned Unix. It appears that this trend is accelerating and the vast majority of applications are now being developed and/or supported only for Windows.

b. The LDEO computing model places a hugely disproportionate burden on the Sun users, who currently pay about $3200 a year (or more) per machine for network support, while Windows, Mac, and Linux users pay nothing.

Though all of these factors weighed in our decision, (2a.) is by far the most important.

In the past six months we have deployed 10 Sun Ray appliances, hosted by a pair of Ultra 10/440 servers (2 MB cache and 512 MB RAM each), and retired 8 desktop machines. The servers are currently operating independently, each hosting 5 users, but in the future we plan to link and reconfigure them for dynamic load balancing (a feature which is built into the Sun Ray Server software). To date, our users are extremely satisfied and most report performance is better than their old desktop machines. In addition, the SunRays produce almost no noise or heat, and their much smaller ``footprint'' relative to desktop machines make for a better office environment.

Caveats:
Our Sun Ray deployment was cheap and easy, and has been successful, because we started with a well-behaved group of users who 1) agreed to cooperate on equipment purchases and share servers and disk space, and 2) are ``medium weight'' users whose needs include general data processing and visualization (i.e. Matlab, GMT) but not extremely cpu- or graphics-intensive work (i.e. 3D model runs or animations/fly-throughs).

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