A successful pilot project was undertaken using Sun Ray thin clients in 2002 on the USS Mount Whitney, a Second Fleet command ship. Now the Navy is expanding the program to all of its surface-based ships. So far, three ships have been outfitted with the new systems, Hedges said.

Sun was the only vendor considered for the project because it already had a high degree of security accreditation with its Trusted Solaris operating system, he said.

The Navy declined to specify the cost of the new systems, while Sun said the system prices vary by the number of users and networks that access the systems.

Mario Diaz, U.S. Navy sales manager for Sun, said redundancy is provided aboard each ship through the use of two servers running Trusted Solaris. Access to Microsoft Office and other Windows-based applications is provided through separate Windows 2000 servers behind the Trusted Solaris servers. The systems can also deliver applications that run on Linux, Unix and mainframes, Diaz said.

Once users have logged in and been authenticated on the thin clients, it appears to them that they are running Windows 2000 desktops, he said.