'Thin client` was the buzzword in the mid-90`s, promising to deliver reduced total cost of ownership through centralised management and cheaper, easy-to-maintain end-user hardware. Despite a brilliant concept, excellent technology from the likes of Microsoft, Sun, Citrix, and Wyse, and a real business benefit to be had from thin clients, they were never as successful as predicted.
Until SA IT managers are able to look beyond initial costs, it will be difficult to justify a thin-client network to them. @PQHead = Short-sighted
Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb
Two key reasons can be attributed to thin client`s lack of steam in the South African corporate market - and if addressed, could see their rise to the prominence that the vendors believe it deserves.
Unconvinced by TCO
The first is the lack of respect for total cost of ownership (TCO) in the local market. Various vendors and their channel partners have raised the point that South African IT managers seem to be unconvinced by TCO, and take the short-term benefit of initial cost saving over the long-term return on investment that thin clients can provide. Thin clients seldom offer a real initial cost benefit over their thicker PC cousins. Even the thinnest-of-thin client still requires a screen, keyboard, mouse, processor, a flash BIOS and memory. Many also have hard drives, and in that form are sometimes referred to as "slim" clients.
[VIDEO]TCO savings are delivered through the centralised management that a thin client environment offers. A single software installation is required to upgrade a large group of users; user control and monitoring can be exercised from a central resource; hardware upgrades to the server result in an upgrade to all users feeding off that server; often software licensing is cheaper, and certainly easier to manage.
However, until South African IT managers are able to look beyond initial costs, it will be difficult to justify a thin-client network to them.
Lack of software
Another factor holding thin clients back is lack of software specifically designed for thin client environments. A thin client is similar to a Web environment, wherein the processing is performed server-side. While memory and processor requirements are not too high on the client, the server will still need memory for every client that must be served. As a result, no true saving is realised in memory costs, with at least 40MB needed for most thin client applications. The irony is that this is one area where serious savings could be garnered. Since applications typically running in a thin client environment are exactly the same as those on the thick client counterpart, the shared systems architecture is not utilised to save on resources.
Every user that uses an application on the server causes another instance of that application to be launched, which can become a resource-intensive exercise when fifty users have fifty copies of two or three applications running. Development is under way to produce programs that support multiple users from a single instance of that application. Some systems that already use such a shared architecture include databases, and a Web application protocol called ISAPI.
Such programs will result in more than just savings on memory - the system will typically run faster due to lower loading times (as the application will most likely already be in use by another user, thus negating the time needed to load it into memory), better caching of results from various repetitive tasks, and even collaborative work environments.
Although thin clients may be a cure-all for many organisations and their IT infrastructures, for others they would be a terrible choice of hardware. Developers, designers, and other power users would be kneecapped by the limited power of a shared IT topology. They seldom have enough power to perform their assigned tasks adequately on the current high-end systems available.
Thin client is also mainly restricted to the corporate market. The complexity of a smaller organisation`s IT systems seldom warrant them going thin, although as they grow they should watch for the point where the IT department can save significant amounts by moving to the new architecture. Home users also have little need for thin clients, although some homes with multiple machines do utilise thin client architecture to provide the kids with cheaper workstations, while Dad gets the powerful top-end machine, which acts as a thin client server.
For those who have not yet investigated the possibilities of thin client infrastructures, I highly recommend a chat to one of the many vendors in the industry. You could benefit from some weight-loss to your organisation - and some gain on your bottom line.
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