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View our Interactive Buyer's Guide on Thin-Client Computers |
To date, thin clients have had a thin presence in the corporate world. PC makers and distributors have sold us on fat for homes and schools, and that's what we've come to expect at work. Giving end users what they expect ensures user buy-in and reduces the need for training.
Despite advances in technology and manufacturing that have lowered the cost of fat clients, however, all is not a bargain. Factor in the cost of management, service and support, and you'll see those costs greatly exceed the purchase price of the computer. For $1,000, you can purchase a PC with a gigahertz processor, a gigabit NIC and a hard disk with more space than the average user can manage during his or her tenure of employment, if not lifetime. But the initial cost is just the tip of the TCO over the life cycle of the machine. Maintenance and application management ratchet the TCO up considerably.
Not so with thin clients, which offer reduced costs in desktop maintenance and application management because the applications are built and saved in a centrally located, server-based environment. Thin clients are assured of accessing the most recent version of applications installed on servers every time they are connected to the network. From a server administrator's point of view, thin-client upgrades are as close as it gets to zero administration on the desktop.
Beyond savings on the desktop, consider the cost of upgrading your branch offices, which must replicate centrally located resources--directory, application, database and mail services. By switching to thin clients, you could save much more than the cost of fat clients.
If you implement a thin client network, you must provision the proper server-based resources, or you will impoverish your processing power. Work with your hardware and thin-client software providers to scope out the correct resources. Map out the number of processors and the amount of memory required for servers based on the number of users and applications. Determine if you can use Linux or Sun Microsystems Solaris applications (both are a good fit for thin clients). If you use Windows, you can take advantage of Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame software to categorize applications as low, medium or high priority. Then look at the network; you may need to implement load balancers and WAN accelerators. Finally, to size your SBC environment properly and ensure you have enough processing power, use a benchmark program like Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner or a server-sizing tool from your hardware vendor.
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