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Thin Clients Still Face Uphill Battle
PenguinCandidate writes "Even after Australian open source vendor Cybersource put on some weight with its Linux 'not-so-thin' thin client product, analysts and users of current thin client deployments still see an uphill battle ahead for the technology. Maybe thin isn't in as long as that plain old PC keeps humming along on your desk?"
At work (I work for a major European mobile telco), we use moderately sized PCs but all real work is done by other computers - we have a connection to a remote virtual desktop and some functions are accessed through (ugh) Internet Explorer on our intranet.
I think the only program, apart from IE run locally is Outlook.
Of course, we only have Dell computers. (ugh)
Just XTerms, thin clients are doomed as long as thinclient hardware is close in $ to a desktop workstation, it will always be doomed.
Doomed it is, and Doomed it shall (probably) stay.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
With computer prices as low as 250€ for a Sempron 2800, is hard to go the thin client way.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Thin clients have been "the next big thing" since the late 1980s, when they were called "diskless workstations".
The problem is, computer systems are fragile enough as it is without making your entire business slow down or grind to a halt, unable to even write a simple memo, whenever the network is slow or flaky. The cost savings of a thin client isn't nearly big enough to justify that kind of risk.
Thin clients were a dumb idea in the 80s, and they're still a dumb idea now. A full 20+ years of hype for them hasn't made them catch on, so give it up already.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
For the DIY crowd, some links on linux thin clients:
* PXES
* Linux Terminal Server Project
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
I don't know what being a thin client or fat client makes any difference. Our company has both, and we certainly don't show preference to one over the other. After all, their weight has little to do with them buying our software products.
Maybe when thin means $99 and not $699. Then yeah.
Everything in the office is moving to webservices. Everyone already saves their documents on some Active Directory server somewhere, in a revision of windows or two Your office icons and everything will be on the server too.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Maybe I am just getting old and cynical - but it seems the reason thin clients aren't catching on is that in most large organizations big enough for thin clients to provide big operating efficiencies, say, at the just-sub-CIO level, these people are rewarded rather than penalized for padding headcount and budgets.
In smaller organizations, it's easier to convince people to deploy innovative solutions like thin clients, but the advantages are minimal since the organization is rarely so large that there are big savings ocer conventional systems.
The people who benefit the most - sysadmins who woudl spend less of their time doind dumb stuff like ghosting systems and installing patches, and users who would not hve to wait days for software upgrades to take effect - don't really have much say in the matter.
And then there's the issue that the whole world seems to be a whore to Outlook, but that's another topic completely.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
According to Larry we can trust Oracle with all of our apps and personal information....as well as powering the national ID database.
>>>Ever spent 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon running Ad Aware on their PCs?
Actually our people always managed to screw their machines up tp the extent that running Ad-Aware was pointless. We just re-imaged.
Now that your remind me my heroically patient co-sysadmin did spend hours and hours and hours talking hapless remote users through configuring their DSL and VPNs. The problem was usually remedied by a fed-exed laptop exchange.
I guess I am old and cyncical, because I'm next tempted to say "nobody ever got a raise for NOT working on nights and weekends." I'm working at Big Huge Company right now and I promise to do the right thing when I can.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Deploying an enterprise thin-client solution is certainly a very difficult thing to do -- expensive and time-consuming even when the deployment is well-planned and goes off smoothly. But if I was a sysadmin who wanted to deploy a thin client solution in my company, I would not try to do it everywhere at the same time. I would find an area where thin clients address well-known issues that are easily identifiable to management, and start there.
For example, here at the rocket ranch, security is an issue (and I mean the kind of security that includes steely-eyed types with assault weapons roaming the cube farms.) Declassification procedures on thin clients like NCDs and Neoware boxes basically amount to frobbing the power switch. Declassing workstations with non-volatile memory, otoh, is a bureaucratic nightmare. Thin clients give us the ability to instantly redeploy hardware as various contracts ramp up and close down.
Here's another example, one that I'm currently working on in real life. While we definitely have lots of rocket scientists on the payroll (roughly 6000 of our 10,000 employees at this site), not everybody on the payroll needs to have a rocket-scientist-level workstation on their desk. We have engineers, and we have non-engineers, and their needs for CPU cycles in their cubes are significantly different. Yet we put the same or similar kinds of boxes on each of our ten thousand employees' desks. While an engineer running monte carlos on her flight control algorithms needs lots of cpu cycles, a manager who just checks his email and does his expense account spreadsheet doesn't. A thin client solution will allow us to leverage these differences. With thin clients for the non-engineers, we may have to hire some more IT staff and retask others, but the savings of just one month of support costs on 4000 workstations will fund the yearly salaries of 4 new sysadmins plus fund all the thin client hardware (including servers) and still save the company $3M the first year.
I think thin clients have a very viable future. To motivate the need for change to thin clients, though, you have to use language that managers understand: ROI, TCO, cost-reduction, etc. And that means thin clients will have to be deployed where you can demonstrate good ROI, low TCO, and significant cost-reduction, so you really must pick your battles when it comes to deploying thin clients.
12 buttons and a mic for input, a speaker for output, and you get limited control of a multi-million-dollar telephone switch. Even better, you have access to "the telephone network" and can have limited control the computers of your bank and more.
Even better, Grandma can use it.
"Look ma, no screen."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem with Thin clients is that the software licensing for applications is so paranoid about wringing every drop of blood from a company it can, and then some. If we didn't have to buy extra licenses just to run multiple instances of the one installation of software on the one PC then thin clients would be far more popular. I've worked out some great hardware setups that are either prohibitavely expensive, or just plain illegal, due to crap software licenses.