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Where Are the Cheap Thin Clients?
Darren Ginter writes "I find many aspects of desktop virtualization compelling, with one exception: the cost of the thin clients, which typically exceeds that of a traditional box. I understand all of the benefits of desktop virtualization (and the downsides, thanks) but I'm very hung up on spending more for less. While there are some sub-$200 products out there, they all seem to cut corners (give me non-vaporware that will drive a 22" LCD at full resolution). I can PXE boot a homebrew Atom-based thin client for $130, but I'd prefer to be able to buy something assembled. Am I missing something here?"
We usually use WYSE clients and you might be right, however, don't forget to sum up additional costs for traditional hardware, such as maintenance (drives, fans)
Am I missing something here?
A cheap thin client?
*ducks*
Though not for the same reason. You get a complete PC for less than a thin client because complete PCs are made in insanely high volumes compared to thin clients, which are a niche item.
Buzz is expensive and somebody's gotta pay for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettop
Comes assembled, quite cheap, can drive usual resolutions, often Atom/x86 compatibility...typically has few redundant things though, like HDD; but that might be useful, together with x86, in case you change your mind.
One that hath name thou can not otter
To me the compelling aspect of virtualisation for the desktop is to be able to use a standard computer to access specialised systems, such as CAD (check out RHEV with SPICE), legacy software or test environments. At work our conference room PC's are actually normal PC's that connect to a 'conference' room virtual machine, it allows instant display of said specialised systems without effort.
AB
...waiting for a skinny latte and no-meat salad?
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
they want their "future of desktop computing" back.
Seriously, I remember talking with some IBM engineers back in high-school and they were so certain that thin clients were the hot new thing that would change the face of computing.
You want to know where to buy thin clients? Goto www.dell.com and buy the cheapest POS they have with a fast network card. Thin clients will always be a more expensive niche player to the PC. After all what is a thin client? A PC with no local storage that can only work if it has a network connection.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
All these costs are largely independent of the number of units produced, yet must be recouped from their sales. By buying a dedicated thin client, you have to bear your share of the product development. Since thin clients sell far fewer units than PCs these costs are higher.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I find many aspects of smart phones compelling, with one exception: the cost of the phones, which typically exceeds that of a traditional box. I understand all of the benefits of smart phones (and the downsides, thanks) but I'm very hung up on spending more for less.
You have to pay more to fit all that technology into a smaller package! If you don't care about space, just run a virtualized desktop on traditional desktop hardware.
BTW I would recommend diskless workstations for thin clients. They may not be the cheapest, but they are full featured, fairly affordable, and well supported.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
$200, $300 is missing the point. If you've going VDI, most of the money will be spent in training the end user, in the displays and their mounting. In most cases the deployment costs more than the thin client. The thin client is a trivial part of the cost, and you might as well get a good one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
slim hardware, no moving parts. Hot desking is wicked.
Well here you go a 1.7GHz off lease Compaq desktop for a whole $75 with shipping. That is pretty much the only choice if you don't want to DIY, because thin clients are a niche that will cost you $$$ that it doesn't sound like you are willing to spend. This is small, can fit under a monitor, and has 20Gb of local storage. Perfect for a thin client.
The simple fact is that is as cheap as you're gonna get, because PCs have economies of scale and thin clients don't. If you just have to have an OEM thin client be prepared to shell out the $$$ buddy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I found out recently a reseller here in Italy distributing the Ncomputing client, which strictly speaking is not a computer, rather a screen repeater; I've had the occasion to try it , and it worked fine for a small office, especially if there are security considerations involved, since there's an actual box that does not have an USB port; there' s no way to take data out except via email.
The price is quite reasonable, and for the vast majority of office work it's vastly simpler than virtualization via the usual suspects.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
The bandwidth requires to drive multiple thin-clients at full resolution.
What are the benefits of desktop virtualization? As they apply to you, that is. Every user of this technology that I know of is a big company or school that needs to deploy hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of desktop systems, and often can't afford to have an IT guy at every site. That's why they're willing to pay a premium price for the thin clients — it's more than offset by lower "cost of ownership".
Even if do have a use for DV that isn't obvious to me, you might as well do it with PCs. The only catch with them is that you have to install the client software on each PC. Thin clients are for people who don't want to do that.
I don't see how this topic is related to having sexual intercourse with your mother.
Personally, I don't see a problem with the home-brew solution. When you want something very specific, its often your only choice. Any it wouldn't be that hard either, you get a Mobo/CPU combo, case/PSU combo, and a stick of ram, it takes you 4 screws, and plugging 3 things, and 2 or 3 minutes in the BIOS.
I have two suggestions: grow up, and learn to read. The guy is pricing new hardware. The system you found is a remanufactured out-of-production unit; even if it were brand new, it doesn't appear to meet his specs. A brand new system from the same manufacturer runs $350 or so.
Sorry motherfucker, but WYSE 3200LE cant run 1680x1050, has 233MHz and is refurbished CRAP.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I think the explanation may be market segmentation. Thin clients are aimed at large organizations, where a few hundred dollars for a machine is chump change. They will happily buy greatly overpriced thin clients, because even the cost of an overpriced thin client on a desk is still dwarfed by the cost of the employee at the desk.
For home users, the picture is different, because they tend to see the computer in isolation. But the vast majority of home users wouldn't want to buy a thin client at any price, because they wouldn't know what to do with it.
If you want a cheap thin client, I would recommend to either buy one second hand (you can get them for under 100 dollars), or to just get whatever box you can and pretend it's a thin client.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Dave Richards is well known in the Gnome community for working with thin clients, specifically for the city of largo, florida. if you wanted some input on the subject you might want to ask him. he's on gnome's planet, or http://davelargo.blogspot.com/
Have a look at the 'Sun Rays' from Sun - they've been around for years; they are cheap and very reliable: http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients The prices shown on the Sun site are list-price - we get a Very healthy discount off of this, which brings the prices down even further.
(give me non-vaporware that will drive a 22" LCD at full resolution)
K.
Will 32x32 (1024) pixels be enough? We can use a TI-83, not even silver, to accomplish this!
Oh, you mean you wanted a non-stupid resolution. As far as I'm concerned "full resolution" means the maximum native resolution a monitor can output.
The client you linked to is about 10 years old. It offers "integration of legacy systems with Windows 2000," and comes in attractive beige plastic. It even carries a Win___ name! Considering that a throwaway cellphone you get from Verizon has about twice as much CPU power as this thing, it's definitely not "cheap" for $100.
...shit bitch motherfucker.
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The "thin client" meme goes back to well before 1993 (when the phrase was coined), and has never caught on. All the reasons why it did not catch on still apply. Mostly, the saving on hardware cost gets lost in the overall cost of the project, plus, the flexibility of conventional PCs (tuning the client installation to the needs of the specific department, and retuning every time the business need changes) has a value that massively outweighs the saving in hardware cost. Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past (yes, I know it's a paraphrase).
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
A minor computer firm is subcontracted to assemble cheapest PCs. They build normal self-contained PCs running the cheapest OEM Windows available. These are $80(+OS) machines running on parts that are a storage surplus after they went out of sale. Then they install the "thin client" software which is some kind of Telnet or VNC or a web browser with intranet connection, pointed at a PHP web app.
So basically the employee boots up the computer normally, starts the app fullscreen and does most of the work remotely.
This has several advantages. The workstations can be troubleshooted locally. They can back up your work if network connection goes down. They allow for custom PC hardware (card readers, barcode scanners, webcams for teleconferencing and so on). They can be upgraded if the need arises, and fixed using off-the-shelf hardware (unless it went so obsolete it's unobtainable). And due to economy of scale, they are cheaper than dedicated thin clients despite being way overpowered.
I've seen quite a few markets and institutions running a system like this.
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In the bin behind somewhere which realised how useless they are. That's where I got my three SunRay 1's :P
I agree fully.
With the KVM & the new spice drives, you can virtualise even your HTPC !!
It does HD quality video over my network with no problem.
This is in the basement.
So all i need on All dekstops is a very simple thin client.
100 mbit nic
hdmi.
Don't forget that the biggest cost in a client is not necessarily the purchasing of the hardware (which is obviously the most visibile cost). Various studies (Gartner, IDC, ...) indicate that a PC that is purchased for $500 (one-time cost) in fact costs somewhere between $1500 and $4500 per year (!) to manage. These hidden costs are mainly into the backend infrastructure supporting these PC's in corporate environments, people managing them, deploying software on them, ... Google for desktop TCO and you'll find plenty of information. Sure, you might disagree with the exact numbers provided by a Gartner /IDC /Forrester but at least it gives an indication.
;)
For thin clients (and desktop virtualization for that matter), this is also where the cost savings are. No serious VDI vendor will tell you that the CapEx (investment in hardware, licenses,...) is cheaper with thin clients and virtual desktops: you need to buy additional licenses, you're going to run desktops on server hardware (ok, 100 at a time on the same box) and then I still didn't start about the licensing galore (Microsoft VECD, Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View or...). The real cost savings are in the fact that it's much easier to manage, and being able to let your very expensive system administators do something else than troubleshooting a desktop (which costs you twice for the end-user downtime and the sysadmin troubleshooting it).
The same goes for thin clients: the up-front investment is larger, but they are very easy to manage (plug into the network and the thing autoconfigures itself, pointing you to your virtual desktop -- which means fewer expensive sysadmin interventions on-site for replacing hardware!), they live longer compared to traditional desktops (these used to have three-year lifecycles whereas thin clients typically have a five-year lifecycle -- roughly speaking you'll need to buy two traditional desktops for one thin client in a 5-year desktop lifespan; I'll concur to the fact that with the economic situation, you'll see prolongued lifetimes for both thin clients & desktops but the idea remains the same, numbers might differ today).
So is the thin client cheaper? In most situations and looking at the total picture, sure it is. Even despite a higher up-front investment. The real problem is not really the price of a thin client but whether your applications and IT environment support thin clients/server based computing (TS/Citrix/VDI).
Sidenote: I work for a consulting firm where I work a lot with VDI & Server Based Computing in general; we strive to be independent as possible (trying to nuance the vendor claims as much as possible for our clients) but that might mean I am a bit biased towards using SBC if it works
P4/512megs/XPpro/20gighhds business class refurbs for $60 plus a $60 15" lcd monitor and strip out what you don't like. I looked around and got an off lease IBM full of bells and whistles for $120. But I could have pulled all the excess parts, closed the holes and been left with a P4 3.0 with HT, 1gig memory, 10/100/1000 LAN, ATI graphics and onboard sound, four usb 2.0 ports, front mounted mic and headphone ports. That would be more than enough to boot a image off the network and use it for light duty.
"I find many aspects of desktop virtualization compelling, with one exception: the cost of the thin clients, which typically exceeds that of a traditional box.
Thing is, if you're using office productivity apps or database front ends (the usual applications for desktop virtualization) then the most computationally intensive part of the job is probably rendering the user interface - so your thin client needs to have pretty much the same CPU and GPU clout as the desktop it is replacing. The Flash RAM costs as much as 10x the amount of HD storage and (since most people expect Thin Clients to be Thin) you're probably paying a premium for laptop-class components. The only real saving is DRAM - which is dirt cheap.
Also, since the main market for these is corporate, any retail prices you see will be inflated so that corporate clients can be offered a nice "discount".
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
My suggestion:
Step 1: Realize that almost nobody wants a laptop that has a busted screen, as it is often more expensive to replace the screen/backlight than it is to get a new laptop
Step 2: Hop on eBay and purchase fully functional laptops with busted screens, with the intent of using the ubiquitous vga-out for your LCD monitor
Step 3: If they have their hard drives pulled, boot them from SD or PXE.
Step 4: Pat yourself on the back. You saved money, you recycled, and you basically have a mini-UPS system built into each machine.
Could do what we are planning and use existing workstations with VDI (http://www.vmware.com/products/view/features.html). Depending on your seat requirements, you may want to try pricing out a homegrown box of your own.
Sig it.
a nice computer costs 1000+$
a good computer is 500+, usable 400+.
you get clients for less than 200.
that is *already* cheap, compared to the option of a full computer.
it's already less then half of what a full computer would cost.
if you want t3h ceapest, probably used computers are the only option.
a full 22" monitor usually means that you'll need at least a gigabit lan, a graphic card of at least 64mb, or a good cpu if you don't have enough graphic.
that's not so "thin" when you think about it.
now consider that the market is small compared to the pc market, and i don't think thinclients costs so much anymore.
The very people who think the cloud is the future, think everything will be written in .NET or JIT'ed javascript. Last few times the thin client idea failed it was because of control, but it seams like each time it comes back there is more over head (more than you might expect from Moore's law). This time I'm not convinced a thin client will cut it. What you need is native apps from a database, one safe place to find apps, and everything kept up to date......Wait that's a repository! Compare the two side by side, mmmmm, I'll use fast native apps from a repository please, especially on a crap machine!
But remember that retail price below 100 USD is extremely difficult becouse of shipping cost from Chine, retail space, etc.
I bought an ASUS Eee PC 900A refurbished for 149 USD from Ebay, so add a VNC client (or the Goole remote desktop software they have just opensourced) and you have a pretty decent solution.
The thin client idea is not about low price, is about beeing stateless. Here in Argentina I work with an ensurance company that has 100% of its apps web based, so they dont need and remote desktop solution, just a plain and simple browser (they can even use a chumby!).
We are going towards thin clients and virtualized desktops at my workplace and I must say the price of the units are not that bad.
If you get some volume the actually cost quite a bit less than a SFF PC, at least the entry level ones.
I've been trying many of them (HP, Fujitsu, WYSE, Igel) out for quite a while and all of them can support 22" & 24" monitors at native resolutions.
One thing to bear in mind when talking thin clients are total cost of ownership (TCO)
The TCO of a thin client is far less than that of a PC.
Not only because the user can't mess it up and because it rarely breaks down, but mainly unit installation and systems management costs.
No need for endpoint security and expensive and complex distribution and inventory systems.
If you work in a large environment with many branch offices you see the advantages immediately.
There is basically no need for on site technicians what so ever.
For an organization they become cheaper to own in the end, which is why they are compelling.
The energy savings can also be substantial!
I have been running scans on our few thousands of PCs for a while and the actual CPU utilization is about 15% average (this is on four-five years old HW, mind you), and yet the users scream for new HW.
The real issue is network latency basically, which is why a centralized desktop solution with thin clients is perfect.
To be able to streamline the performance of the server cluster to the actual usage of the clients saves our medium business ten's of thousands dollars each year.
Couple this together with the fact that users get almost no network latency what so ever to databases and application servers and you have a sure business case.
You already included a link to $249 PC in your blurb, for example. $249 is dirt cheap when you look at how far prices have fallen over the past several years, and not far at all from the sub-$200 price point that you speak of. If the cost of a full-blown PC is already dirt-cheap, there will naturally be little economic incentive for a separate genre of thin client PC's.
Here you go: http://www.norhtec.com/products/mctc/index.html
You're welcome.
The savings you can do with a thin client solution is not in the hardware, but in a more stable environment with less hassle for the user as well as support. I expect you to know this already, so what you need to do is to try to estimate total cost for a fat client solution compared to a thin client one and see if its profitable for you. The difference of a client for $200 or $90 every 4 year will not be what makes it viable or not.
> Am I missing something here?
Yes, a little thing called "mass production".
First, TCs are cheaper on the whole -- e.g. it's harder for a thief to steal a TC (because they suck without servers), replacing is basically zero-configuration etc. etc. The cost of the TC itself (the equipment) can be more expensive and yet the whole solution be more economical (there's a plethora of other economies not mentioned).
But, TCs are different -- which means they're not the commodity desktop PCs came to be.
If you want really cheap, buy mass-produced PCs (I believe we've seen them reach USD$200 in recent times). BTW, depending on a series of factors, your current PCs might turn cheaper or not -- but surely they would avoid an initial investment.
BUT: TCs are worthy as much as the central maintenance team. If you can't manage it well, TCs will flop...
Basically, the basis for thin clients making sense is the supposition that computing power is expensive (just as in the old mainframe days, when the premise was that making lots of terminals and then one big machine made economic sense). Guess what? That doesn't hold true anymore. Computing power is cheap. The "nicities" of good graphics support, decent I/O etc is more expensive than the processor. So why not include some decent processing power in the "thin client". In this case, it is just a regular low-end PC (stationary equivalent of a netbook) running terminal software.
I think this has been missed, but Android, and Chrome OS are really thin clients to Google's cloud with minor local functionality.
The true NX type thin client, though good, is going the way of the Neanderthal.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
'Thin-client' goes a bit far there. My HTPC is a diskless client that netboots a MythFrontend. This way, I transfer the pre-compressed streams (which will always be able to be more efficient than any real-time compression) to my box. The box has no storage and the computational complexity required is sufficiently low to avoid overly loud noise.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103228
$200 and should drive a 22" monitor no problems, can't confirm PXE bootable, but with 160GB HD it should be easy enough to load up a netboot stack.
With the inevitable move to web-applications and 'the cloud', wouldn't the ideal 'thin client' be an inexpensive nettop with a decent web browser?
And if your organisation "is not yet ready for that move", install the thin client software on those computers so they still work in your old environment.
I haven't seen anyone reference the firm we use. Devon IT (www.devonit.com) sells thin clients for $129. They aren't perfect, but they work well, they have no moving parts, and they can be centrally managed.
As others have pointed out, the volume, among other factors have conspired to make the whole thin client network terminal a dead horse in the race for the last, what? 20 years? More like 30 probably. Not that there aren't applications for them, or that they don't have their own virtues. Just that since they remain a niche product for whatever reason, they remain more expensive in terms of bang for buck, than a traditional PC, which helps keep them a niche product. Rinse Repeat.
While there are some sub-$200 products out there, they all seem to cut corners (give me non-vaporware that will drive a 22" LCD at full resolution). I can PXE boot a homebrew Atom-based thin client for $130, but I'd prefer to be able to buy something assembled. Am I missing something here?"
With thin clients, the biggest savings isn't in the cost to acquire. It's in the cost to operate and maintain. Compare a thin client to even a low-spec PC with a full OS that can have apps/viruses/spyware/etc installed.
It's not about the cost of the hardware. A large organization will want the cost of management and support to be low as that is an ongoing expense. A thin client that costs double what a PC costs can return that upfront cost over a couple of years worth of much cheaper support costs.
Some Atom based Thin Clients are great machines, e.g. Foxconn's Qbox - though not fan-less which is a problem for some users. Most of the Thin Client operating systems are for certain boxes only (and seem pretty outdated), I'm very happy with LISCON OS which is Ubuntu based and runs on a lot of machines, e.g. the Qbox as far as I know. You can evaluate a demo version: http://www.liscon.com/lmd cheers
SoC parts that can deliver such high resolutions have become available only recently, thanks to the HDTV boom. Before that, ARM or MIPS graphics were usually limited to portable LCD or NTSC resolution. We at Thinvent are building such thin clients, using ARM processors. Using the TI OMAP3505, we deliver up to 2048x2048 resolution. Using the TI OMAP L138, we can deliver up to 800x600 resolution, for screen sizes less than 10". Especially interesting is the market for all-in-one thin clients, where the thin client is built into the LCD monitor, allowing quick installation.
1) Go out and do a volume purchase of the cheapest Dell system that meets your needs.
2) Remove hard drives
3) Sell hard drives on ebay to offset (reduce) cost of systems
4) Use as thin clients
5) Look for new job, after you got fired when the company you work for realized that thin clients suck and you had to go back and purchase hard drives for all of the systems
We use over 150 "thin clients" on our network, all Linux based and all controlled by a single (large) Linux [xdm] server. We used to use "real" thin clients (Xterminals) by Tektronix, but as their prices rose and the price of cheap, fanless, low power, small, VIA boards dropped 8-9 years ago, we decided to start making our own.
We have not regretted the decision. Now we have complete control over the hardware and software. We have the ability to run real local clients when necessary.
Right now, we are in the process of upgrading to fanless Atom 270 based motherboards from Jetway. Total cost- about $250/ea.
Plus these same corporations buy in bulk. If you buy in 10K lots, you'd be surprised how low the cost per seat can go.
It all comes down to "green technology", and I don't think I'm very wrong about it.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Anything 'pre-built' is going to cost too much or be otherwise unsuitable. It isn't hard to find Atom-based Mini-ITX systems for like $150. There's also things like that piece of hardware MSI was putting out that is basically the guts of a netbook in a package that mounts to the VESA mounting plate on the back of an LCD and has its own stand...though I don't know what that was supposed to cost. I would think a good Atom machine would be cheap, and more than suitable. (Perhaps even overkill.)
Speaking of thinclients though, I actually have an old IBM hardware x-windows terminal. It's very cool. :3
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I have two thin clients from either 1990 or 1991 sitting in my roof, and generally speaking that was the last time they were actually useful.
The reality is that dropping a cheap desktop pc on peoples desk, having a data policy, and having file servers is alot cheaper than thin clients. The simple fact is that the market is mostly driven by joe blogs with his home pc and he has no use for thin clients (despite many attempts to make thin clients relevant in the home). When you talk about thin clients its always business and enterprise which instantly adds a 1000% mark up of any hardware. Joe blogs buys so many home pc's in fact that their prices are so competitive, unlike thin clients.
Want to pxe boot some atoms? your not going to beat that price, but be prepared for some pain, because licensing thin clients (even your own) is ridiculously expensive at the backend.
There has also been alot of hot air released into the IT world about "centralising data into the datacenter" which sound great until you actually do it. WAN optimisation does help, but only so much.
On top of this, thin clients are a perpetual network nuisance. They seem like a good idea until you get 50 or more clients on the same network segment continuously sending tiny little video updates and realise "holy god my network is being flogged to death". It sounds great but the truth is that sporadic write from clients to a shared file server consume much less bandwidth (people will scoff, but you'd be surprised how much different the network profile is for x number of desktops vs x number of thin clients, even with the rather thin rdp protocol).
There are places where thin clients are used however and heres why:
1) Compliance - i know one place that uses them exclusively because they just cant afford for their data to sit on desktops. I.e. the data itself has to be in some central secure location
2) POS/Kiosk type work - i.e. people at windows servicing clients
3) people who bought into the concept and now regret it... I know too many of these.
There are advantages to them, but when viewed with an eye to what people are trying to achieve they mostly become irrelevant when people realise policy (cheap) can easily dictate fixing the problems they are trying to fix with a technical solution. One great one i love hearing is how user X can login to any terminal (or even remotely) to the exact same desktop. How many of your users ACTUALLY need that? Can you seriously say that a terminal server for vpn with access to the same file shares and mail server cant give you what you need? Are your users running around random desks every day they come into the office? The truth is (assuming your on windows at work) that profiles will give your users pretty much all they need - a pre-configured outlook and the network shares they're used to seeing.
The second one is data, stopping users from saving data locally where it might be lost. Well, this is were policy can save your bum. It'll cause some pain now and then (though rarely) when a user looses a bit of documentation cause it was saved on his desktop (Despite the bleedingly obvious file server sitting next to them on the network) and his drive failed but the reality is this is so very rare the cost of a thin client solution becomes rediculous in comparison.
Thats my $0.02 anyways. Thin clients i find quite interesting, but they are rarely useful at solving any real problems except in niche and very specific scenarios.
Stay away from "enterprise solutions," then — or, rather, make very careful comparisons between the cost of buying a ready-made thing and a DIY effort.
That the thin clients you've been looking at are priced for fat organizations (with, possibly, thick decision-makers).
Mind the Gap
Not just the cheap thin client, it is the data centre side where you really pay.
From experience, thin clients save neither money nor power cost once you have taken the hit on the data centre side server, storage and networking capacity they will take and then the huge bill for the virtualisation management software. (assuming you are using Windows type thin clients, if you use SunRay and Solaris yes you can save some serious cost but most users will WINE until you connect the SunRay to RDP off a Windows server and giver them their familiar environment back)
HP has their own Debian Linux based client client OS called ThinPro. If you want to add more packages all you have to do is add the standard Debian repo's to /etc/apt/sources.list and your good to go. They're pretty flexible if you know some basic Linux. The best part is they have a much fuller Linux base then many other Linux thin clients. They support even more advanced features such as multimedia redirection(video and USB) as well as the basic XDM, ICA, RDP connections. All of them can drive almost any monitor from a standard 17" LCD to dual 30" LCDs. The cheapest model is ARM based. Its basically a Marvell OpenRD or Netplug with a video card and smaller disk space. All the others are x86 based and vary in speed and price.
They're getting there, just be patient!
I'm about the evaluate the Fit-PC2 for work, which can be had in diskless forms for under $250. http://www.fit-pc.com/
And I'm currently posting from an EeePC 901 running eeebuntu, which is actually quite a bit better and can be had for under $200. Plug in an external monitor, and rig up the built-in LCD and peripherals as a fancy KVM switching interface for your various VNC, RDP, VMware, NX, etc. backends. I'm really impressed by the Compiz desktop performance, so you can still get pretty slick transitions between various sessions on different virtual desktops.
And I'm really looking forward to the explosion of new nVidia ION netbooks and nettops, which will actually give a real nVidia 9400 GPU and dual-core Atom processors to these "thin clients", which means they can actually be used more or less like a real box in terms of running web-based interfaces and things without stuttering and pausing occasionally.
So with a dirt-cheap nettop, unfortunately you'll pay a little bit more than your target, but at least you get extra features (like a small SSD, built-in speakers, keyboard/mouse/multitouchpad, and maybe even a webcam, etc. that you could probably put to good use with a bit of creativity.
There's little incentive for the traditional desktop makers to deliver cheap thin clients. It further erodes their already thin margins for desktops, reduces revenues, and puts a whole support industry out of work.
There are a handful of companies making low-end computing devices based on highly integrated chipsets with some processing power. Freescale has some that aren't bad, and TI's OMAP 3530 series (see http://beagleboard.org/) is a good candidate. The definition of thin client will need to change, too - it'll become a diskless device that can run a virtual desktop off a server *or* a centrally managed browser using web-based apps (where rendering, playback is local.)
HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.
From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday
From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148
$200, has been $180.
To be fair, all these products are very recent, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be aware of them.
There are others too, but they tend to cost more.
That's exactly his point, he wants that PC without the hard disk, CDROM or OS.
What do you think that should cost? Maybe $150 ? Why aren't there any tickboxs to do it ?
Why is there a separate genre of thin client PC's that cost so much more?
Who is being conned here?
For sake of this argument, let's assume that in your shop your users are running applications that benefit substantially from local CPU power. In that case, it makes a lot of sense to give the user a real CPU, not a shared, virtual one. You could use a stripped down PC as the "thin client." The cost of these devices are at the commodity level, and you can be assured that your getting what your paying for.
Now, keep in mind, you can still leverage some the benefits offered by virtualization by using some of the abstraction/encapsulation techniques that are de-rigueur in virtual environments. The first step is to remove local storage from a standard PC and require that all of your remote clients will use PXE boot and network storage only (iSCSI or similar). Now, you will get the benefits of using network storage, without sacrificing CPU power. Specifically, this solution encapsulates the user's OS and application licenses in a single place. It provides increased reliability by giving every workstation RAID protected storage.
This design which uses "virtual" disks only gives some benefits from a TCO perspective. For example, you can assign software to individual users, not local hardware. Users may use any available or job-appropriate workstation, and gain access to their licensed software, etc.
I admit I haven't tested this extensively under Windows, and may be more picky about activation/licensing issues when moving to different local hardware. Linux would have absolutely no trouble with this mode of operation.
As others have said, low volume of thin-client sales keep the price high -- high fixed costs per unit outweigh the savings in electronics & licences in a full PC. Note the unsharp competition.
What you are missing is that first-cost (equipment purchase) is a very small part of TCO. The biggest cost is for user time doing maintenence/downtime. This has always been MS-Windows achilles heel, requiring ~10% user time for stability/security.
At $10+/hr, it doesn't take too many hours to pay any differential in HW cost. This (and paranoiac security) have been the drivers for TC.
Personally, I'm intrigued by the underlying concept of stateless computing. Of course an oxymoron, the idea of minimizing or focussing state is attractive. The anti-indirection. Starting with /etc and progressing (or regressing to .REG), others have also found the idea compelling. Very low state made IBM mainframes relatively unattractive compared to PCs, excessive state makes MS-Windows (and some perversions of Linux) hard to maintain. An optimum is still to be found -- on a clear disk [no goals] you can seek forever.
You can find a 24" flat panel SunRay for about what the 24" flat panel would cost. If they're on a decent network their performance is actually pretty nice. Check ebay first as you might find a bunch from a company that was testing them or has a deploy and is upgrading or something.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From CDW: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?edc=1199380&enkwrd=ALLPROD:(902114-01L)
Wyse S50 for $218.99
Supports RDP and Citrix ICA
The retail price of something is rarely based on the cost to make the unit. This is a common fallacy. The retail price is primarily determined by what the market will pay for the unit. It's just that simple.
The demand for thin clients is much smaller than the demand for full-blown, self-contained computer units (primarily driven by home sales).
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Cheap or inexpensive? to me cheap is crap and inexpensive means the value exceeds the cost
Initially, these made sense for my application. Today, it makes much more sense to pay 30-40% less for a netbook that has faster processing, better graphics, twice the ram, much more storage, and doesn't need it's own keyboard and monitor. On top of that, power consumption is very similar and reliability is much higher.
Nobody seems to see a netbook without the screen and keyboard for less money. Seems stupid, but for that kind of hardware that isn't in a netbook configuration, you pay over $500, while the netbook runs $300.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
From Newegg: Shuttle X27D
Add in a 2GB stick of RAM and you're looking at around $210-230 per seat. They PXE boot, work great with LTSP and Ubuntu, and they drive a Samsung 22" LCD at full resolution. How cheap are you expecting?
If you want to go below that, you're going to have to start salvaging old machines and converting them to thin clients. But then, you're only saving the purchase price, and the real compelling savings with an Atom-based thin client is the 50+ watt power consumption savings.
Why not just buy used ex-corporate PC's that are already licensed for XP Pro and buy a couple of pallets of them for $40-$65 each? Add a couple of used laptops, say $100-$120 bucks, again licensed with XP.
And have them running RDP to the terminal server and lock down the OS, including USB ports, etc.
If one breaks, give it back to the computer recyclers and get another one from the pallet, clone the drive and away you go. Hire an admin for under 50k yr, and have him admin 150-200 PC's.
Why are you adding a layer of overhead?
Really, why? Every 'feature' of VDI can be done without VDI, equally as well. VMware and the like didn't invent net booting, drive imaging or anything else like that, they just add an extra layer.
There isn't anything you can do with VDI that I can't do with out it, equally as well, assuming that I buy standardized hardware, which is pretty much what you're doing if you're buying a bunch of prebuilt 'thin clients' anyway.
Your thin clients for VDI have to have EVERYTHING that a full PC has, except a disk if you don't want to cache locally, its kinda hard to save a bunch of money on hardware when you are essentially using the same hardware, minus a $50 hard disk.
You use the same processor, the same memory, the same mobos, mice, keyboards, video, sound, all of that is still there and is still standardized in your thin client. The difference is you're paying more for it being a 'thin client' for no apparent reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Chinese webshops supply thin clients for as low as $53 w/free shipping worldwide.
I think the savings in deployment and long term maintenance of these terminal units are just an illusion.
1: Unix/Linux systems[10] use copy on write. You load an application or library once and use it for the many users who are running the same application. The application runs significantly faster because the CPU cache and even more significantly, disk I/O cache hit rates are far higher than on a desktop system which is running half a dozen unrelated apps. This means you don't need 1000 servers to handle the load of 1000 desktops, or even 100. Your system utilisation goes from ~3% to ~90%.
Desktops. No maintenance. No 3 year upgrade cycle. The money can be spent adding business value instead.
Your desktop support problems switch from a linearly increasing management headache to the logarithmically increasing infrastructure management headache which you already have anyway.
2: You need a service desk anyway. You don't however need a desktop support guy for every floor, or local mail and file servers with the additional storage and management cost that implies. With a centralised infrastructure, distributed filesystems like AFS actually make sense, and can reduce or eliminate data duplication and duplication of business processes.
3: In what way is a remote desktop one size fits all? 95% of business users barely need more than email. Those who do need more can be provided workstations/whatever if the advantage is obvious enough.
4: You run a redundant distributed compute cluster. See Condor, GridEngine etc. The nodes are independent. Killing one, or even some of them just means others get used. You lose the network or network services? Exactly how useful is a standalone PC anyway?
although terminals are able to a certain degree to deliver these, it is often awkward and demands more than a cheap disk-less unit.
The cheap diskless units are bog standard PCs without disks. If you can stream it to a PC, you can stream it to a PC running as an X-term. ESD just isn't that difficult to set up
[10] Windows terminal servers are another matter.
Deleted
It's in the trunk of my flying car.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That 2 cents must be in elbonian zlotys or such, as you advocate a straight windows solution on Slashdot. You could at least try to put some OpenGL over ip on Ubuntu servers and clients in the mix. D-
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I didn't think a thin client was anything other than a diskless PC connected to a server. Seems like if someone needed a lot of them cheap, they could look for pallet loads of recent vintage/good enough specs off lease whatever computers from some corporation, where they remove the hard drives for destruction, and just use those. I bet you could get a bunch for fifty bucks apiece that way if you shopped around.
With that said, some company that already had full workstations could just remove the drives themselves, then add some servers, etc to achieve this thin client goal.
I guess I am just not understanding why less hardware has to cost more money, or is hard to find. Heck, my local rural town whitebox shop sells entire *bundles* of refurbed old business desktops plus crappy old monitors if you can live with a 15 inch one and keyboards, etc for 99 bucks, add 20 bucks for a 17 inch monitor. Pull hard drive, insert ethernet cable, add a server in the closet some place with some switches, etc. Just not seeing the problem here outside of the actual case might need to be tiny or something. If the guy found a deal for pallet loads with the hard drives and optical drives included, they could yank those and ebay them, then put the money towards more RAM maybe or setting up the servers, etc.
There's always barebones deals, too, for "brand new".
It's small, and simple. It netboots, has 1GB of ram and drove my 19"monitor just fine without any special work. For the price, you can just ignore the 9" screen.
Don't bother buying the latest and greatest. Get machines that are near the end of their sales life. It's cheaper and they'll probably last just as long.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
My last major desktop upgrade (other than disk and RAM) was when the bright purple flash let the magic smoke out of my P266 machine - I replaced it with a 2.4GHz Celeron. I'm about to have to upgrade again, because I want a better display, now that you can get high-resolution LCD screens for under $200. The problem is that my current graphics card can only drive 1280x1024 VGA, so I'll need a new card, but most cards that can do more than 1400x900 use PCI-Express, not AGP. So if I want a new screen, I'll need a new motherboard. Alternatively, if I want a new internal disk drive, they're all SATA these days, so I'll also need either a new SATA card, or just a new motherboard. And of course if I'm getting a new motherboard, that'll need a new CPU :-)
The alternative is that there are some little $200 Atom-CPU boxes that have HDMI; the problem is that they typically come with 1GB RAM and don't say if you can upgrade that (and sorry, 1GB isn't enough for Firefox these days, much less fancy video stuff.) They also need external disk drives to add any significant storage, but that's tolerable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well on Score 5 to be honest - because I don't read below that unless moderating or following a thread I won't say for sure!
BUT : CELLPHONES
cheap internet clients by the millions, or billions.
There you go. The elephant in every room.
I wish I worked for Vodaphone, there would be nothing to worry about.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
All of those are capable of LTSP either as PXE-boot or disk-boot (HP only disk-boot). The HP is quite nice but I can't get good sound quality out of it, none of them can deliver full screen video in good quality (HP is best due to the good GPU) All uses std. PC keyboard and mouse, std. laptop RAM and got either 44-pin PATA (HP & eBox) or SATA interface for flash/ssd/harddisk. Right now we are using them as semi-thin clients, they got OpenSuSE 11.x with KDE but with all user applications removed except
There are some funny features like: 10+ levels clipboard (from OpenSuSE), Alt-Tab changing between client task instead of server task, mounted USB-drives are not at the root of the drive on Citrix server, they are in a directory. We do not have any graphic-heavy applications (we are a financial business) so it is woking quite well. I've recently read that SAAB (no, not the almost killed by GM car company) are testing CAD/CAM on thin clients... ...and they are quite sure now that it will work.
Well, it's kinda like hard drives. There's a minimal cost to make the drive no matter how much space you make available on it. You pretty much never see a brand-new hard disk selling for less than $40, even if it can only hold some absurdly small number of gigabytes.
Same goes for computers. Even if you use old technology, you have to price the unit to cover the up-front costs of design and licensing as well as the ongoing costs of manufacturing and logistics. By the time you get your unit out the door, it's $150-$200 retail and most of your prospective buyers will look at it and say, "Heck, we can get second-hand Pentium 4 desktops for $99 a pop. No thanks!"
Am I missing something here?
Perhaps the 'sort by price' option in the link you provided?
We did an extensive study and pilot of thin clients recently. Even at $260/thin client, when you consider the back-end servers, storage, VM licensing (on both the server and thin client), and recurring costs -- thin clients worked out to be about $710/unit. We currently buy desktops for $650/unit, and this actually gets worse over time due to licensing costs.
A typical workstation costs 500-600 euros.
WTF was this about again?
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
We've had good experience with the Pano cubes.... they run vmware images, so it's easy to push out templates. And the unit is soooo small. No fans, nice performance. I think it's 2.5x.2.25x2.5inches, small AC adapter too.
Only problem is that it will not do dual monitor without a weird adapter ( and it's VGA, not DVI ) And the video card is crap ( but you're limited to VMware's compatibility there anyway )
Want a thin client? To hell with hardware variation! A default Linux kernel, out of the box, can boot damn near anything, and access every network card I've come across in years, and X11's VESA driver can handle just about every display out there. Keyboards and mice and a no-brainer.
Setup a working PXE net boot environment with all your thin-client apps, and go. Drop in any old surplus PC, found in any dumpster, anywhere. 98% chance it'll work. If it doesn't, write it off as trash and spend $30 on the next forklift pallet of 'em, or in my case, point the supervisors to the pile...
Old PCs are hazardous waste. Even if they work, companies actually have to pay people to take them away. Every company that's been around more than a decade has them, and they're just warehoused somewhere. Drop them in and go. If you're a new or expanding fast enough that this won't work, you literally can find off-lease equipment in bulk for under $50/each.
Buying a thin client is akin to buying bottled water...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have recently worked in the Thin-Client (TC) enginering division of HP, so I can tell you, with some authority, that what you're looking for is not a TC. You're looking for a cheap desktop.
A TC focuses on security, simplicity, and low energy consumption / heat generation. A TC company spends a LOT of money on engineers who work very hard locking down a TC's OS and physical access ports to make sure it is secure, making it simple to use and maintain, and making them run at as cool and at as low a wattage as possible (23W TC vs. 250W desktop).
Security is important because a company that uses TCs uses several hundred at least, and usually thousands or tens of thousands. When an IT department is looking to buy TCs, they're for users who don't know a lot about computers, like car rental agency reps or hotel front desk reps who just need to check what cars/rooms are available, process your reservation, etc. Another major use for TCs is for grocery store checkout lanes, including self-checkout lanes. That's why security is so important. Most of these employees know just enough about computers to cause problems through their ignorance, and when the anyone has access to these machines, via self-checkout lanes, you need to make sure they are secure from hacking.
Maintenance is a huge problem because these companies may have only 5-10 units at any one branch, but multiply this out to hundreds of branches, and maintaining them becomes a massive problem. You don't want to pay for IT personnel to travel around the country, and outsourcing the maintenance to local companies is also cost prohibitive (as well as impractical). TCs are attractive in this scenario because you can simply have the branch manager mail a broken TC to your IT HQ, and mail a replacement back. Anyone can plug in the replacement, and it's immediately good to go. Doing this with a desktop computer costs several orders of magnitude more, because special care has to be taken to make sure the moving parts, which a TC doesn't have, are secure, and the whole thing is padded well. Desktops are also much heavier, and directly cost more to ship as a result.
Lastly, you have to remember that the initial cost of a computer is often less than the cost of energy to run it over the device's lifespan. Cooling a device, when enclosed in a grocery store self-checkout system, also costs energy. Now that many grocery stores, hotel front desks, etc., are open 24/7, the total energy cost is significant.
So what you are looking for, my friend, is a cheap desktop. A TC is not what you're looking for.
Problem: desktop user downloads email attachment "Happy Birthday from Nigerian Banker.exe", virus/trojan is unleashed on your network and attempts to spread.
Solution: In a VMWare View/thin client environment, you take any infected user's virtual desktop offline and push a fresh, clean version to them. Reprimands will be in order for the person resposible, but work stoppage will be reduced to a minimum AND the effort can be handled by one person instead of a team of people to clean up the aftermath.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
The HP T-series thin clients are quite nice. I have one in production driving a wall-mounted display. It's a t5000 series, specifically the t5735. It has DVI, VGA, parallel and serial, audio, USB, everything that a normal desktop has, AMD Sempron 2100+, 512MB RAM, 1 GB internal flash, and runs Debian Linux 4.0. By default, it has a stripped down Debian install, but has Gnome and gives you root access - I just added the packages that I needed and was ready to go (though it also has software for Citrix and RDP, etc. HP lists it for around $500, I got an open box demo, with full warranty, for $130.
SymbolNOBODY:
You said what's quoted below from you, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1476008&cid=30428430
"It's tolerated (perhaps encouraged) in part because these annoying actors are otherwised engaged in improving Linux. Major Debian and BSD contributors, for example, use slashdot as a workspace for their human-machine interaction side experiments, of which APK is probably one. In addition many of these trolls post links which, if you follow them, will completely hose a Windows machine. This is part of the game. - by symbolset (646467) on Monday December 14, @01:15AM (#30428430) Journal
I took offense to the BOLDED part... & ALL you EVER seem to have is "ad hominem" based attacks on people, not the points they make. So, my reply in the URL below was simple (and logical):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1476008&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=30428430#30430244
Additionally, "symbolNOBODY"? Well - the day you can make something like this (& that got you PAID for it, & that has done as well for others online):
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=b861a743aa23c4568b7d73e07ef7ecec&showtopic=2662
That's also gone over 250.000 views worldwide in 1++ yrs.' time online, & across 15 forums where that guide for Windows Security has been made either an:
1.) "Sticky/Pinned" thread
2.) An "Essential Guide"
3.) Rates 5/5 stars (etc.)
AND, gets "feedback" like this from users that have applied it:
----
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28430
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"...recently, months ago when you finally got this guide done, had authorization to try this on simple work station for kids. My client, who paid me an ungodly amount of money to do this, has been PROBLEM FREE FOR MONTHS! I haven't even had a follow up call which is unusual. Now I don't recommend this for the average joe, but it if can work for a kids PC it can work for anything! Now, i substituted OpenDNS and activated the Adult Content filter with them for this kids computer. I know its not perfect, but will catch over 99.5% of said sites."
and
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=10f9ba9ad5ff990aaae1e7ec91f593a2&t=28430&page=3
"Its 2009 - still trouble free! I was told last week by a co worker who does active directory administration, and he said I was doing overkill. I told him yes, but I just eliminated the half life in windows that you usually get. He said good point. So from 2008 till 2009. No speed decreases, its been to a lan party, moved around in a move, and it still NEVER has had the OS reinstalled besides the fact I imaged the drive over in 2008. Great stuff! My client STILL Hasn't called me back in regards to that one machine to get it locked down for the kid. I am glad it worked and I am sure her wallet is appreciated too now that it works. Speaking of which, I need to call her to see if I can get some leads. APK - I will say it again, the guide is FANTASTIC! Its made my PC experience much easier. Sandboxing was great. Getting my host file updated, setting services to system service, rather than system local. (except AVG updater, needed system local)"
Thronka - forums member @ xtremepccentral.com
----
THEN, when you have done so, on THAT account? THEN, you can talk!
Also?
When you have done all of this as I have over time in this Art & S
I think you are missing the point on thin clients. A PC for a basic client has a pretty limited lifespan and tends to require in-the-field support. It also requires antivirus software, some level of routine maintenance, and has a substantial failure rate in either software or hardware. A thin client lasts a very long time and needs basically zero in-the-field support, no antivirus(server side A/V instead), etc etc.
When you licenses office or terminal services use, you tend to get better pricing than standalone versions and with software assurance you can stay with the most up-to-date versions for a reasonable price.
The Thin client costs as much as a PC up front but will last 2-3 times as long, which in a big picture thought process means they cost 1/2-1/3. Less IT guys in the field saves money in wages.
Thin clients typically burn 20-30W where a PC will typically burn 180-220W. A single PC can cost $160-200 per year in electricity and a thin client just $13-15. if you have 200 stations thats a difference of $32,000 vs $2600. If you design to have servers run desktops and separate server run apps then you can likely get 200 users into maybe 4 servers (An RDP server and 3 Application servers) and have a nice thin-client system with web and office.
Other benefits are that every user runs the same version of software. Every user has access to the same storage for documents. much more confidence in security settings being applied as there is no local PC to hack on. Have a user with special software needs? You can assign a user to a Hyper-V instance running the OS and software they need. Need to help a user to do something? RDP allows you to share there desktop easily without another package and at reasonable performance.