Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now, the terminals that work has had since 2003 are back in vogue. Awesome.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
its all in the upkeep, It is cheaper and easier to maintain a bunch of servers, and have a bunch of lightweight computers hooked into it than to maintain a individual machine per EVERY person. While there will always be things that having a individual machine is better suited for, for those people where all they need is internet, database access, and word processing, it makes little sense to not just maintain that stuff on a secure server and farm it out to everyone else. I have been pushing this for years in our school district, its only been now where the people who get to make the decisions are finally listening.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...or, well, it would have been first if I wasn't on a thin client waiting 15 ^%*^&# seconds for a keystroke echo.
Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...
You just got troll'd!
Is now just a bunch of generic PCs in smaller form factors. So in essence you're sticking a network layer between the rest of the computer and it's video card. So instead of network outages (which are inevitable) crippling just network operations, they now cripple everything including your ability to keep typing your office documents or looking at the email you've already got.
It's annoying as hell, but if my network craps itself I still have a working computer in front of me and I can still do a subset of what I was doing before. Not so with thin clients.
<tinfoil mode>
Of course they want to take the actual computer away from you, they want to have control over you. If they could, your "computer" would be a mindless terminal to a Big Brother Approved mainframe that spied on everything you did.
</tinfoil mode>
When you have customers with thick clients, sell em thin ones cause they are "better-er".
When you have flogged off all of your customers with a thin client, the new thing is a "better-er-er" thick client.
Whole thing sounds like very simple 101 style marketing. Why try to sell someone something they have? Convince them what you have is better. Total no-brainer imo.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
How about a netbook-style device which could offer limited functionality on it's own for email, web, basic office apps (say a boot image updated from the central server when connected), and used as a thin client at the office plugged into a docking station with proper display(s) and keyboard+mouse? Best of both worlds?
.: Max Romantschuk
We have recently adopted a phased approach of deploying new thin clients as our estate of traditional desktops hit retirement. After having seen several false dawns and uncomfortably proprietary solutions in the last 15 years, it was only now that we have been happy enough with the whole solution (thin client HW, network connectivity, back-end virtualization SW) to take the plunge.
There are now a range of HW clients (we use ChipPC).
There are a couple of viable virtualization systems (we use Citrix Xen, without the presentation server "tax").
We've chosen a dedicated virtualization hardware appliance on the back-end from 360is.
Finally I can sell all the Wyse 120 terminals I have in the garage! If you want me I'll be high-rolling at the casino for a couple of weeks...
Task Mangler
My clients are all obese, and show no intentions of slimming down; what am I doing wrong?
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
Oh yes its back the battle that everyone has been waiting for its the Rumble on the Desktop, the fight of the century, the challenger is the undisputed next year champion, fighting out of California by way of Finland it is the Penguin himself, Tux "next year" Linux.
And now the champion, dominating in the 70s, losing form in the 80s, disappeared as a recluse in the 90s and the start of the century but now he is back to claim his crown. With the black trunks and green trim its Thin "Latency is a Bitch" Client.
Lets have a good clean fight to finally decide who will be declared the Desktop champion of 2009.
This fight is sanctioned by the ODC (Optimistic Desktop Council) and will be fought under rules of low data, huge assumptions and a complete lack of understanding on the total size of the market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
There are plenty of downsides too. While it might be easier to maintain, it is also easier to fuck up. Someone does something that breaks a piece of software, now the whole department/company/whatever doesn't have it rather than just that person. A network outage is now a complete work stopping event rather than an inconvenience. Special software installs for special tasks are hard since that software has to be tested to make sure it doesn't hose the server.
I could keep going, if I wished. Now that isn't to say that means the thin client model is bad. In fact we are hoping to do it for our instructional labs at some point. What I'd really like (and there are VM solutions to do) is that not only would we have thin clients, but a student could use a laptop as a thin client too and load our image from their home or whatever.
However, the idea that they are just cheaper/better is a false one. They can be cheaper in some cases, in others you can easily spend more. Likewise they can simplify some thing and make others more complex.
There isn't a "right" answer between large central infrastructure and small distributed infrastructure. It really depends on the situation.
All I will say is if you are looking at doing this at your work as you suggest be very, very careful. Make sure you've really done your homework on it, and make sure you've done extensive testing. I don't think it's a bad idea, but be sure you know what you are getting in to. Just remember that while people get whiny when, say, an e-mail server goes down, if the terminal server goes down and NOTHING works, well then people go from whiny to furious in a second.
It's the same kind of deal with virtualization. It is wonderful being able to stack a bunch of logical servers on to one physical server. However if that one physical server dies you can be way more fucked. You have to spend a good deal more time and money in making sure there is proper redundancy and backups and such. So while packing 10 servers on 1 using VMWare Server (free) might be nice and cheap, you also might be creating a ticking time bomb. You then might discover that putting those 10 servers on a small cluster with a fibre channel disk array and VMWare Virtual Infrastructure (not free) solves the reliability problem nicely, but isn't quite as cheap as you thought.
Just something to be careful with. At work we have both sorts of things. We've got individual desktops, and we've got thin clients (though we actually got rid of most of those). We've got individual servers, we've got virtual servers, and so on. All methods have advantages and disadvantages. I am not a zealot either way, just warning that a change from a decentralized to a heavily centralized infrastructure isn't something to be done lightly. You solve various problems, but introduce a host of new ones.
In particular hardware reliability is something you want to keep in mind. You for sure want an "N+1" situation with your terminal servers, perhaps even more than that. You can't count on the hardware being reliable. Hopefully it is, but I've seen even the real expensive, redundant shit (like a Sun v880) fail with no warning. When it's the be all, end all and all work stops when it is down, that just can't happen.
too many dumb users (ok I am being too harsh here, too many uneducated users) these days. Thin clients = less freedom, which in case of most users means they'll make fewer mess ups.
This means less boring maintenance work for IT people, in large companies especially.
1. Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.
PR loves to masquerade as news because it bypasses your BS filter. An ad for Men's Warehouse suits gets looked over, a piece of news that you won't get hired unless you wear a suit, tries to replace your premises with theirs and let you take a leap to the "I must buy a suit" conclusion. Or better yet, to the even better conclusion, "I must only hire people in suits 'cause everyone else is doing it." There are a lot of sheeple out there who only need a "The Herd Is That Way -->" sign to willingly enter someone's pen and be sheared like "everyone else".
For anyone who's not sheeple, this is a non-story. Whether _you_ need a server instead of PCs or not, depends on what _your_ needs are and what _your_ employees are doing. Use your own head.
The only ones who need an "everyone else is doing X" story are those who have to follow a herd to feel secure.
Hence, the love PR has for this kind of story.
2. Over-simplifications like "all they need is internet, database access, and word processing" were false when arguing why grandma should only need an old 486, and tend to be just as false for a company. So you'll have to do some analysis if for a particular company that is indeed true, or just glossing over what's really going on. (Or even wishful thinking by some IT guy who feels his job would sound more important if he was overseeing a server.)
E.g., a lot of companies have salesmen who go with a laptop to various customers to give a presentation and try to win a contract. Are you ready for the case when that guy you're trying to sell insurance doesn't have internet to connect to your server via VPN? Are you sure that those server side apps' files can be converted flawlessly to MS Office or whatever those sales guys have on their laptop?
It's just one example where goimng, "bah, they only use database apps and word processing" is glossing over a more complex problem.
3. The argument for saving costs is a good one, and far from me to advise wasting money. But you have to be sure that you're actually _saving_ money across the organisation, not just saving $1000 in the narrow slice you see, at the cost of causing $1,000,000 to be lost in workarounds and lost productivity somewhere else. Entirely too much "cost cutting" lately is the latter kind of bullshit theatre.
E.g., if someone costs you $100,000 per year -- and I don't mean just wage, but also electricity costs, building rent, etc -- saving $1000 is nullified if it drops their productivity by as little as 1%. Saving a few hours per year of an IT guy's work can be a very bad trade off, if it costs that guy as little as 5 minutes total per 8h work day to put up with the quirks and delays of the centralized system. (480 minutes a day, times 1% is 4.8 minutes.) It can add up very easily to that. It only takes wasting 1 second per form through some web-app instead of letting that guy massage the data locally in Excel or Access(*), to add up to more than that in a day. A close enough approximation can very easily be approximative enough to actually turn the whole thing into a loss.
(*) ... or whatever F/OSS equivalents you prefer. This is not MS advocacy, so fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.
And as you move higher up the totem pole, things get even funkier. If a salesman is doing contracts worth millions of dollars with those presentation, I hope you better save a _lot_ with that centralized solution, because it only takes one lost contract (e.g., because he couldn't connect) to put a big minus in the equation. E.g., if you're going to pay a CEO tens of millions per year, and actually believe that his work is worth every cent (heh, I know, but let's keep pretending,) then... again, you better be damned sure that you don't drop _his_
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And later in the year, when the corporation I worked for lost 10 million because one of their customers went bankrupt, I, by chance, got to sit in on a bigwigs meeting.
After announcing the loss and accompanying layoffs, he actually followed it by saying "And I don't think suggesting thin clients will help us out of this one."
Man, it was so hard to keep from laughing...next time I hear that, and it sounds like I will hear that again, I think I'll just risk my job and have a big belly laugh.
From physics, it's obvious that centralized computing is more energy efficient than distributed one. The longer distance you have to move energy (that encodes the information) to compute the results, the more energy you need. Also, centralization allows for better resource sharing.
The only issue is who pays for the costs. Mass production of computers allowed to decrease their costs to the point that distributed systems were cheaper than centralized ones. However, as the demand for computer power grows, energy spent on computing itself enters the equation, and the times will change again.
Easy, same way I handle it at our office with our terminal server: "You can't do that."
Employees have no business copying CDs worth of data to (or worse, from) the office. In the eight years since the implementation of our terminal server environment, I have had exactly zero cases where there was a legitimate need to copy large amounts of data from the terminal server.
Your computer at work is for working, not playing games when you think nobody is watching. Almost all of the complaints I get from employees wanting a "real PC" instead of a thin client revolve around their desire to screw around on the clock without being detected.
In 100% of the cases where the employee was granted a PC instead of a terminal, later investigation revealed unauthorized usage within one month, ranging from forging call sheets to play flash games to a salesman using over 75% of the company's total internet transfer in one month at myspace.
>Even with a GUI terminal, if it was stripped down and wasn't Windows based
>(and had drastically limited Internet access), I think a lot more would get done around offices.
Bingo! That is exactly what we have- Linux server, Linux apps, Linux thin clients (160). Everything is locked down tight. We have everything users need in order to be productive and nothing else (accounting apps, OpenOffice, Firefox, Sylpheed, IceWM, some utils). Internet access is only through a white list of approved sites. But this ONLY works because the CEO supports the concept and allows us to say "no" to users/departments who think they are "special". And yes, the CEO uses a Linux thin client also (although he and Directors can browse outside the whitelist; but still no Flash, Java, nor sound).
I worked exclusively through thin clients for a year at my last job and absolutely hated it.
It was slow, and ungainly and every now and then - from a few hours to a couple of months - someone else's X session windows would pop up on my screen. Wonderful in an environment where we worked with secret (as in classified as) information. We knew the problem, and the IT guys could usually fix it in a few minutes, but the fix always seemed to be temporary somehow.
Not to mention you're costing productivity for people like me who tend to work very rapidly via esoteric hotkeys, and rapid fire keystrokes, and using the keyboard buffer to issue commands to dialogs, context menus, windows that haven't yet appeared. One of my earliest employers once described seeing me work at a computer as "really making that thing sing". So sticking me on a slow machine or dumb terminal is costing you my productivity and happiness. And it's not like a decent machine $1500-2000 is really that big of a deal spread out over the several years it will last. Especially if it's one more straw kept off of the camel's back that keeps me for looking for another job and costing you domain knowledge and experience with your unique problems when I leave.
IMO, thin clients should be reserved for "guest" users who will only be temporarily using your network where no degree of customization or where speed is not important. Like an interactive presentation or a library, or some temporary event.
Question everything