Thin Client effect for the future

[alliknowisnetworking]

I would like to know if Thin Clients are starting to creep back into the mainstream again. I mean they've always been here, but in the past they were supposed to be the next hot thing, then they sorta fizzled out, but now I've seen a few companies going with these thin client terminals.

Does anyone think that thins will take a significant market share in the future. Im talking in the corporate environment. I dont think thins will take the home market.

And what effect will this have on IT employment?

"Users are like Prostitutes,..They need guidance"-Myself
A+,Network+,MCP+2000

 

[mmorancbt]

I move companies off of PCs in favor of thin-clients (windows dumb terminal version) for a number of reasons. Cost out the door is not the biggest factor. Certainly one could purchase cheap PCs but why?

I have a device with no moving parts, takes seconds to replace, and can be "hid" anywhere.

I've been doing thin-clients extensively since 1996 and published several white papers and presented for NCD (which sold of their hardware line in favor of management tools)& EWeek at PC Expo (not TechXNY) for a couple of years.

But there are hurdles to overcome. For many who have grown and raised in a PC Centric environment, tightening controls with mandatory profiles, group policy, and the like is a philosophical shift that they have difficulty with. Those who have dealt with IBM mainframes and iSeries or other unix flavor - terminal based systems, seem to understand it more quickly.

What I normal do is retain PCs that are reliable but make them book right into an ICA (Citrix) or RDP client connection. When a PC is being put out to pasture, I put a thin-client in its place.

I utilized kixtart and WSH scripting for all sorts of nifty controls over the environment and minor mods to the desktop so that I don't have to change profiles every time an icon changes. In most cases, I use mandatory profiles and script changes where needed.

Here is a scripting article I wrote specifically based on a Scripting Framework I created in a thin environment.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=102209

I hope this was somewhat cogent and helpful.

Matthew Moran
Read my career blog at:

http://www.cbtoolkit.com

Career Blog:

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/career/

Todo esta bien.. Todo esta divertido (it's all good, it's all fun)

 

[ThoraRune]

As an enduser in a Citrix enviroment I work on a Thin Client on a daily basis. If all thin clients are the same it does not have the ram required to adaquately do my job. Yes we are very limited in what we can get into and do which I understand is a security issue and why Thin Clients are used. But when you wait and wait page after page of document images all day every day there are major issues for the end user. We grow frustrated in that we cannot adaquatly do our jobs which creates job dissatisfaction. It is the perceived mess that has brought me back into the classroom to see what I can learn in computers to work around issues like this. Who knows where this may ultimately lead to. Another tech perhaps with a sympathy for the enduser more then what will make my job easier. We all want our jobs to be easier so we need to look at how the tech decision also affects enduser being able to work.

 

[jsteph]

ThoraRune,
This would be the same if someone gave you a PC with a Pentium II and 64 megs ram and you tried to run Windows XP.

It's a matter of correctly sizing the Citrix Server--the same as someone should correctly size the PC's if that's the route you go.

In our case we got 300 Wyse Winterms, and we're starting with 20 dual-xeons with 4 Gig ram each as the server farm. Even if all 300 users are logged on all at once--which will be rare--that's still over 256 Ram for each user, and we're only publishing 2 apps for them to use. Our early tests with 15 clients on the dev box were very impressive as far as response time and feel. You really had a hard time telling that you were operating a machine that was in fact hundreds of miles away over a 256K frame circuit. It's a good thing, in my opinion.
--Jim

 

[dilettante]

Another huge factor can be the applications themselves.

A poorly written application based on a file database (Access/Jet, FoxPro, etc.) will improve to a degree when moved to Terminal Services (or "Citrix") because heavy network traffic is replaced by heavy disk I/O. Once the user population hits a certain point though (or the "database" is moved off the Citrix box to a file server) things begin to crawl again.

Applications that use excessive CPU cycles (busy-wait loops, encryption, etc.) could also cramp up a shared machine. There are also tendencies to use a sort of "suck the whole file into a string/array" technique in client applications. Too much of this (or with files that grow too large) and you can run into memory and VM bottlenecks.

But just plain outgrowing the server's resources is probably the most frequent issue. People don't really profile applications properly and we typically throw hardware at those sorts of problems.