Sun Microsystems announced the company nearly doubled shipments of its Sun Ray thin clients during the fourth quarter of Sun's 2008 fiscal year, compared to the third quarter of its 2008 fiscal year. Sun Ray unit shipments are growing fast, underscoring the increased appeal thin client and desktop virtualization solutions are experiencing among businesses and organizations. Contributing to this growth is strong market demand for Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0, which now ships on approximately 25% of Sun Ray units since being introduced in March 2008, in addition to the unparalleled choice Sun Ray thin clients offer customers, enabling them to display Solaris, Windows or Linux desktops on the same device.

Sun Ray virtual display clients, Sun Ray Sofware and Sun VDI Software 2.0 are key components of Sun's broad desktop virtualization offering, which are a set of core desktop technologies and solutions within Sun's xVM virtualization portfolio. More information on the Sun Ray family of virtual display clients can be found at www.sun.com/sunray.

“As an early innovator in the thin client market with nearly a decade of experience, we're pleased to see the growth Sun Ray clients have experienced during the past year and are encouraged by the growing appeal of desktop virtualization technologies industry-wide. Organizations have truly begun to realize the benefits that thin clients and virtual desktop solutions offer – with respect to cost savings, ease of management, eco advantages and more – to their business,” said Bob Gianni, senior engineering director of desktop systems, Sun. “Sun is investing heavily in desktop virtualization technologies and believes strongly in the market's potential for further growth.”

Sun offers a complete desktop-to-datacenter virtualization product portfolio and comprehensive set of virtualization service offerings to help customers deploy new services faster, maximize the utilization of system resources, and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. Sun's virtualization products help to provide unified software management tools and virtualization capabilities across operating systems, servers, storage, desktops and processors. For more information visit www.sun.com/xvm.

Compelling New Customer Deployments
Highlighting the growth in Sun Ray adoption, Sun has seen a number of new deployments of Sun Ray technology by customers around the world. For example, Colorado State University (CSU) is a leading research university, dedicated to energy conservation by implementing programs that help reduce CO2 emissions and promote the use of solar technology and recycling. Through its ground-breaking Academic Village, Colorado State University uses Sun Ray virtual display clients in an innovative way to enhance learning and create an eco-friendly IT infrastructure.

“Sun Ray solutions fit in nicely with what we’ve done to build the green Academic Village. Not only do Sun Ray clients take up half the space of a PC, but we’ve also seen that they consume less than 10% of a typical PC’s Power. Sun is dedicated to providing eco-friendly solutions and that really matters to CSU,” said Mark Ritschard, director of Engineering Network Service, College of Engineering at Colorado State University.

BankIslami Pakistan Limited is a dedicated Islamic commercial bank offering a full range of commercial banking products and services. The bank replaced its HP thin client solution with Sun Ray 2 virtual display clients and Sun Ray Software. The Sun Ray solution provided the bank with a cost effective solution with reduced hardware maintenance costs, improved security and scalability, and effectively delivered a rich Linux desktop environment.

The U.S. Navy’s Integrated Warfare Systems Lab (IWSL) is part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The NSWC provides the right technology, capabilities and specialized research to support all aspects of surface warfare. The IWSL chose the Sun Ray virtual display client solution running on Sun Fire V490 servers to provide access to a broad range of IT systems from a single device.