FAA using Solaris?

How the FAA Is Bringing Its Air Traffic Systems into the 21st Century

Wow, since Solaris is dead, I'd be afraid to fly.  NOT...This is a great feather in the Solaris hat.

Sun's
open-source OpenSolaris/ZFS/SunFire server/Thumper storage
infrastructure—which features built-in, state-of-the-art virtualization
capability—was a key building block on which the FAA IT evaluation
group settled. Some of the new software is already being used in the
air traffic system; ZFS (Sun's open-source Zettabyte File System) is
being used in the FAA's air traffic data center.



"The FAA uses a large quantity of Sun Solaris servers in a variety of configurations to support some of our noncritical business applications,"
Andy Isaksen, manager of the Communications Infrastructure Engineering
Team for NADIN and architect of the original mainframe system, said.
"ZFS is being used on at least one service within the Air Traffic
Organization Enterprise Data Center."

Missing the Ultra-Thin point

I just read this article on ZDnet: I don't think Mr. Murphy is really hitting the point.

1) Sun Ray's aren't good at everything
2) Sun Ray's are Great at somethings (This beg's the question of #1, but I thought I would say it for completeness)
3) Most corporations have at least 50% of there people using desktop's
4) Desktop's are expensive to manage. (Regardless of OS)
5) Managing desktops is easier to do centrally. (Regardless of the OS)

Hence, an Ultra-Thin type of client is easier and cheaper to manage if it's centralized.

Is Sun Ray's the only answer? NO. Is it AN answer? YES.

Want to run Citrix on a Sun Ray, No Problem, Want to RDP to a Windows Term Server, No Problem. In my humble opinion, this is what makes Sun Rays such a great solution, flexibility.