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New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback
One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.
Which is why its not a great idea putting mission critical thin clients across a WAN
Though having worked for several years in large corporate environments (and their associated love for citrix farms), I would observe
- WAN accelerators work. A riverbed (mind you at ~$50,000AUD a pop it ain't exactly cheap) will make a 2M link seem like LAN speeds for the protocols its optimised for. Depending on cost of bandwidth....
- Consolidation does not have to go overboard. If there are at least a few hundred users, it can be cost efficient to run a local server. Most network problems that are not a result of a bungled change / cabling stuffup are WAN.
- Government network? good luck with that buddy!
- The bean counters find it very easy to quantify the cost 'savings' and push their agenda as such. However for your potential losses due to downtime caused by network outages.... heck the fortune 500 I am contracted to presently doesn't even have a method for estimating the dollar cost of downtime, let alone a method for estimating the amount of downtime likely to occur (needless to say they also choose the cheapest carrier, which has a ridiculous inability to meet SLA, and then consolidate like mad to place even more reliance on the WAN).
Like most things in IT there is no silver bullet or magic formula, each case needs to be judged on their own merit.
And on a side note, given how much hardware costs have dropped and the fact that user requirements have remained relatively static (i.e. most generic office workers are still using the same software as 4 years ago), how hard can it be to embed the email client (with local cache so they can at least view emails they already downloaded) and office suite on the thin client itself so at least they can keep working on documents?
Of course the the idea of running a server and a bunch of lightweight clients is so much easier to tend to. I work for a school district and we run our own version on thin/diskless clients. We have a few thousand running now, and change about a thousand a year more over every year. After 3 years of great improvements all around, we are never going back to individual stations. I do find it comical that old ideas seem to keep coming back, and it just might be because they are good ideas. Of course, we run fat/diskless for most of it, so that kills most of the downsides. And yes, we run a little over 700 machines from one server.
Our district already has it, each school has two T1's direct to the district office, VOIP, and web all go through there. Works fine, only problem is we can't get the morons at the district to remove things from the content filters.
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