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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?"
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.
Eh? Don't know what you're on about. I'm sitting here posting this on a thin client. I have a standard PC keyboard, monitor and mouse. I am looking at a normal PC session (in my case Gnome on Linux, but whatever). No retraining required, either for software or hardware. My hardware is an old PC with nothing but the motherboard left in it, running LTSP client. Cost me effectively nothing.
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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It is with the bottom end desktop boxes
Which usually contain COTS hardware. Which a thin client can also use today. Like the submitter said, slapping together a thin client is easy.
they have to sell them at a higher price to recoup development costs
There are basically no development costs in this case, nor are the components high margin enough that production volume can make a significant difference in purchasing price. We're not talking special hardware here, we're talking miniITX/laptop MB's which are produced in the bazillions range whether or not a thin client producer uses them.
Personally I'd say the higher price is because the target market is almost fully corporate and corporate purchasers usually have difficulty comparing prices with anything that's not explicitly listed as equivalent. Which gets you the old triple-the-list-price and then let them negotiate a 50% discount and the customer will feel good about his leet bargaining skillz.
The more you pay for a bicycle the less you get? What on Earth are you talking about?
The most expensive bicycles are not full-suspension mountain bikes that can go anywhere. They are racing bikes with few gears and really suited only for flat terrain (although with a sufficiently powerful "motor" you can go up hills, of course.) So yes, the more you pay, the less you get. It's not just weight, but it's largely because of weight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with thin clients isn't the lack of knowledge. It's the break-even point.
In order for thin clients to become more affordable than deploying standalone workstations, you need to deploy atleast 200 of them, and 200 workstations rules out a lot of businesses.
Cost of licensing and server infrastructure is really the problem, not the cost of thin clients themselves.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
People are looking in the wrong place. Move outside Intel and AMD.
$99 for a computer in a keyboard from Norhtec. (In fact, the prototype is still linked in my sig, but I have no connection to the company.) Video is available at Linux For Devices, but the Gecko Surfboard doesn't appear to be listed on tNorhtec's site yet.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
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.
The organisation I work at (it's a university) spends about a million quid a year because people fail to turn off PCs overnight. The running costs of your cheap Dell POS are much higher; the power consumption too.
For clerical and administrative staff, we can put 7-14 virtualised desktops onto a single box/blade - more with non-whole-stack virtualisation or terminal services. We put our heat generation in a few places, we do get better utilisation. We also export pictures of our data to users, not the data itself, which is quite a bonus.
The downsides are what you'd expect: mostly, we have fewer spindles to deliver storage to the desktops (this is the biggest issue we face, I think); multimedia is okay-ish; for heavy computational users there aren't really gains to be had.
It's certainly got its place. Anyone selling you a "one size fits all" for your organisation probably doesn't understand your organisation, but this isn't not a completely incredible approach.
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.
Let me answer your points directly as someone who has been doing some POC's of thin clients in a large (40k+ environment)
1. it simply switches the cost of the workstation maintenance to the back office as you need an immensely powerful data centre to drive thousands/tens of thousands of these terminals;
True except it is always cheaper to manage and maintain those systems than desktops. We know per unit how much each desktop costs us to manage and maintain and we also know the same information for our big-iron boxes and Citrix farm and it came out that if we could serve 20 users per server it was a large cost savings and it helped with support. We even got savings at 10 per
2. you still need a service desk as most requests we get are for new employee accounts and handling typical release incident;
You need this now anyway in a large enterprise environment and you now need less deskside people and remote support is easier.
3. people want to stay competitive and having a one size fits all typically prohibits one-offs, even if there is an obvious advantage;
Not if you do VDI which means you deliver a full desktop to the users
4. problems affecting a cluster will affect everyone so you still need backup PCs for critical service delivery.
No you just have a multiple deployments and redundancy. In most large corporations most apps are client server (Regardless of if that is a fat client or web client) so there is experience in making systems redundant.
Does it work for every user? No but it does for most, the challenges are:
1) The initial cost of deployment
2) User and business acceptance
If you can solve those issues you will experience year to year cost reductions.