PCs 'are too pricey'

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 22 Apr 2008

PCs are too pricey for Africa's schools, says NComputing CEO Stephen Dukker, and alternative technologies should be found to populate the classrooms of the continent's 600 000 schools.

Ernst & Young consultant Neil Butcher last week told a Nepad e-schools conference, in Kempton Park, it would cost $240 billion and take 10 years to establish a PC/Internet infrastructure for the continent's schools.

Speaking from California, Dukker said "desktop virtualisation" could "dramatically cut the estimated cost of deploying an entire PC/Internet infrastructure in 600 000 schools across 53 countries".

Dukker says desktop virtualisation using "quiet devices" would reduce that cost by as much as 70% and electric consumption by 90%. By using such technology, "Nepad would save billions of dollars".

A "quiet device" is a dumb terminal that delivers a PC experience using the compute cycles of the shared machine. Dukker says the idea is not new and is in a way, a return to the mainframe idea of the 1960s and the mini-computer era of the 1970s, when multiple users accessed a computer from a number of remote dumb terminals.

"Even the lowest-cost PC is now a supercomputer and 90% of that resource is being wasted unless the user is a scientist or mathematician," says Dukker. He continues that the first wave of virtualisation - which made companies such as VMWare multibillion-dollar powerhouses - showed the savings and efficiencies that could be gained from consolidating servers.

"We are now focusing on consolidating not servers, but users, on any PC using Linux or Microsoft."

Cost considerations

NComputing has about 600 000 virtualised desktops installed worldwide, including 200 000 in schools in Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic.

He says that implementation, as well as others in the US and Brazilian school systems, proved that "by sharing PCs and not requiring a PC as the client device, you completely change the economics and reduce the cost per user to the point where huge new markets become viable".

"The key is that the client devices are not PCs - they cost incredibly little to make... our devices cost $10 compared to no less than $150 for the lowest cost [Intel] Atom CPU. In this model, 20, 30 people can share an individual PC, which lowers the cost per head of owning computers."

Macedonia example

Dukker says Macedonia decided to computerise its schools as the government there had concluded that "if their people were to share in the economic viability of Western Europe, they had to become members of the 'knowledge information society'".

It chose a solution that linked one PC to seven client devices. "The country's IT minister is on record as saying that they chose this solution because it was the only one the country could afford. Our tender was maybe a quarter of the cheapest PC-based solution and one-half of the next-cheapest virtualised solution.

"But the minister said affording equipment is only a part of the total cost... there was no point in acquiring the technology if they couldn't afford to operate and maintain it," says Dukker. "Since our technology is not a computer, the power consumption of our terminal devices is basically one watt."

Dukker adds that PCs become obsolete every three to five years and Macedonia also recognised the "government could never afford to replace 200 000 PCs every three to five years. But with user-sharing, they can afford to upgrade the shared computers. The terminal devices have no personality; they behave like the devices they plug into. So you only have to replace 25 000 computers to upgrade 200 000 students and this they could afford."