What is a Sun Ray?
I realized after my flurry of YouTube blog entries last night that I didn’t “define” what a Sun Ray is – and while many of our customers know, some of you may not.
There are quite a few “flavors” of Sun Rays – but they all do basically the same thing. The one pictured here is a Sun Ray 2 – it is about the size of a VHS tape (if you remember what that is). To keep things simple, let’s just say from the user’s perspective it appears to work just like a PC at your desk – but only way better.
Not only is it very small but it has no moving parts to break or wear out. It doesn’t get infected by viruses nor will it heat up your office. If it gets stolen there is no information on it. All “computing” is done on a central server – that makes things easy to manage all from one place. I could go on . . . . .
For the typical home I still claim that a Mac is best, but for businesses – really anyone that has more than a couple of users – Sun Rays are quite simply the only way to go. Even “Power” home users should consider it – especially if you are managing a PC for the 2 1/2 kids, the wife and yourself.
See the videos below for some cool demonstrations. And of course if you would like more information feel free to e-mail me at mike dot cornelia at gmail dot com. Or you can visit Sun’s website to learn more.
I’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now and just thought I’d share my view on the usefulness of this tool:
Basically Google Alerts is a tool you set up to scour the web and let you know of anything new. When it finds something new that matches your search criteria it sends you an e-mail – either once a day, once a week or as it happens. So for example you could create one alert that monitors news websites for your local town. When your local town’s name is mentioned in the news, you get an alert via e-mail.
For even greater interest create a comprehensive alert for your store’s name. If your store has a more general term as the name you would do best to use quotation marks (i.e. “The Report Card”) so you get more relevant results. The results can be very interesting when you see people blogging about shopping at your store or when a local newspaper mentions you.
Lastly, create an alert to notify you about your competitors and what they are doing. For example, create a comprehensive alert for “Lakeshore Learning” (remember to use the quotes) – they are mentioned fairly frequently.
If anyone finds any other cools uses of Google Alerts please feel free to share . . .
Cheers, Mike
We’ve had a few customers ask us recently about importing data directly from manufacturers / vendors. This is something we’ve always done and apparently taken for granted. We brushed up some of the programs recently and then demonstrated it for a couple of customers who were pretty amazed at how straight forward it was to move data from a vendor’s spreadsheet into their item database.
If you’d like to update your item database en masse from a vendor’s spreadsheet then drop us a line and we can schedule some time to update the programs on your server and give you a little ‘101’ on the process. And while our standard hourly rates apply, this time saving feature can pay for itself in a hurry.
A quick little demo of what we can do for customers who want to run Microsoft Windows programs on their Sun Ray. What’s fantastic about this is that you can have your cake and eat it too. That is, you can have the benefits of a Sun Ray at the user’s desk or at the store stations but still have full Windows functionality.
Some of the advantages of using Sun Rays over Windows PCs:
- Low maintenance
- Easily replace or add new stations – just plug them in!
- No worries about viruses or anti-virus subscriptions
- Uses only 4 watts of power vs. 80+ for a typical PC
- Security: control user’s access to data & applications
- Single point of maintenance: maintain everything at the server instead of each user’s desktop
- Stateless: no moving parts to break like hard drives or fans
- Backup can all be done easily at the server – no need to worry about what data a user stores at his or her desk
- Hotdesking: see the other demonstration below
- Silent & Cool: no noisy fans or heat producing power supplies
All this adds up to the perfect solution for businesses of all sizes. The acquisition cost is comparable (sometimes less) than low-end PC’s but the on-going savings add up quick! Total cost of ownership is much less than a group of PC’s.
These late spring thunderstorms are giving us all, and our computer systems, cause for concern. The Help Desk has been a buzz with power spike, brown out and black out calls from customers. I myself have replaced one computer power supply just this week that got zapped sometime over the weekend. For the record, the computer *was* on a battery backup until the battery needed replacing last month and I was neglectful in replacing it in a timely manner. As I shop for battery backups I thought I would share what to look for with the group.
A battery backup (also known as a UPS for Uninterpretable Power Supply in techno-babel) is basically a medium sized battery coupled with a cool surge protector. It helps keep power spikes at bay and will kick in with battery power during brown and black outs. Depending on the size of the battery, and how much equipment you connect to it, you will typically get anywhere from 5 minutes to as much as an hour or more of “run time” once the power goes out. I consider it *mandatory* to have one of these on any server – and a great idea to have at the cash register station, especially if you are in an area that suffers from unreliable power.
Here are a few things to look for when shopping:
- APC is recommended both by Sun and by SUM/IT – and pretty much the best brand you can buy.
- Be sure it has a “Replace Battery” light on the front, or an LCD information panel – the batteries inside need to be replaced about every 3 years and it needs to have a way to let you know when it’s time.
- Point of sale stations need something small – look for “350 VA” to “500 VA” on the box.
Our recommendation is this: APC CS 350 - If you want to run point of sale stations for even longer during lengthy power outages consider the larger “server” unit listed below for one of your stations.
- Servers require a bit more – 750VA minimum, but 1000 – 1500 VA would be recommended.
Here is a unit that gives you good “bang for the buck”: APC RS 1500 VA
Tips on hooking them up:
- Pay attention to the outlets – some will say “battery & surge” and others might say “surge only” (be sure to plug the equipment you want protected into the “battery” side).
- Do not plug high power-draw devices into the battery backup: things like vacuums, fans, and laminators would be VERY bad.
- Laser printers can only be plugged into “surge only” outlets.
- Make sure you can see the status lights on the front at least occasionally. However, most battery backups will give you an audible alert when they require attention.
- Don’t forget to plug your networking equipment into the battery backup too. Your point of sale equipment won’t work very well if it can’t talk to the server.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or need additional information.
Another demo – this time connecting to my Solaris desktop via VNC on the Mac.
VNC lets me connect back to my data at the office from anyplace I can get an internet connection. VNC runs on Solaris, Mac, Linux or Windows – and best of all, the programs are usually free.
This makes access to information so easy. Not quite as cool as Hotdesking with a SmartCard – but just another convenient way to stay connected.
Now why would people pay a monthly fee for GoToMyPC ?!?!
Enjoy!
hot·desk·ing (hŏt-desk-ing)
verb
1. To burn your desk in effigy, thus loosing one’s job.
2. A fantastic creation of Sun Microsystems that allows you to move your desktop session on-the-fly from Sun Ray to Sun Ray.
3. A cool, sexy, seductive way to manage your desktop using SmartCards.
Hotdesking is simply fantastic. I find more and more uses for it daily. It provides convenience, security, mobility and easy access to all your data from any Sun Ray on the network or even over the internet.
I thought a video demonstration was the way to go – so much easier to show than to tell.
And it is pretty stinkin’ cool to walk into a colleague’s office and slip in my smart card to show them something on my screen. Move from office to conference room to retail floor and then finally home and keep my same desktop session the entire time – and have access to all my data, all the time.
Call me a computer geek – but Hotdesking via SmartCard is just plain sexy.
PS – sorry for the poor lighting at the home office – not quite bright enough for the video.
Has it really been this many months since a blog post?!?! It has been a tremendously busy few months to say the least – working 70 to 80 hours many of those weeks (and one too many of them in a row). I have so much to tell everyone about I don’t know where to begin . . . . . . . and I don’t really have enough time this holiday weekend to get into a lot of detail, so let me just “tease” you with some of the recent happenings . . . . .
- To help ease some of our “growing pains” here at SUM/IT we are working on a partnership with another computer company for them to provide project management, hardware installation and extended support capability for us.
- A tremendous amount of research and development has gone into the Sun Ray thin clients we use for POS & desktop workstations. We have amazing new features to show you including using them to connect to remote Windows computers and using them as kiosks in your store.
- The Solaris 10 Operating System continues to impress me as I delve even deeper into it. It’s stability, security, performance and flexibility are unsurpassed – now I know why Sun Microsystems calls it The Most Advanced Operating System in the world. Just to give you an example: we now have Windows programs running directly on the Solaris server – no other machine needed!
Do I have your attention yet?
Stay tuned for more . . . . .
Just a quick note to say that the Evangelism is paying off. One of my co-workers here in the office just bought their first Apple for home use. They chose an iMac from Best Buy and excitedly called me from the car on the way home. 🙂
They said they have been looking for about six weeks now and had just about settled on a new Dell. But when they added up all the pieces of software they would have to buy in order to protect the Dell (anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-spam) and then compared it to all the software that came with the Apple, the Apple actually came out cheaper!
Daylight Savings Time is finally upon us, although three weeks earlier this year (and likewise in the fall it will be one week later). This will pose a small problem for those of you on SCO servers and older machines. The biggest issue will be that if your clock is left unchanged your hourly sales reports, employee timeclock data, and transaction time stamps will all be behind by one hour.
The only way to fix an SCO machine is to upgrade it – at the cost of over a thousand dollars. The new Sun Solaris machines come patched and testing in our lab shows they handle the new time change appropriately; although we may have some older Sun machines that require a software patch. We will be keeping a close eye most everyone’s Sun servers tomorrow morning to see if any are affected. Sun offers a free patch to its effected servers; the only problem being that the patch has to be installed in “single user mode” meaning someone has to be on-site to install the patch. We need to do a little more testing in the lab to see if we can simply send you instructions on how to fix this yourself.
The current game plan is to manually set the time ahead an hour on affected machines, and then set it manually again in three weeks when the machine tries to adjust for the old Daylight Savings Time. If you come in to the store and find your server’s time is behind by an hour please call the Help Desk @ 888-786-4816 for assistance in manually setting your clock.
This brings me back to the fact that we need to get many of you to upgrade to our current hardware and/or software. Even if you are running the current version of our software, if you are running it on an older SCO server then we need to talk about hardware upgrades. It really needs to be in your budget to replace your server every five years. Running your business on anything older becomes unreliable (much easier and less expensive in the long-run to be pro-active rather than re-active). I know we talked to many of you about such upgrades at NSSEA last weekend and quite a few of you took quotes with you. I am spending this weekend finishing up a few more quotes that I need to get out and I’ll be following up with many of you this coming week.
As always, if you have any questions please drop me an e-mail or call the Help Desk.
Thanks,
Mike
mcornelia.com 