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Going Thin - About To Be In?

Thursday, 14 December 2006 by Michel Roth

Another article at EnterPriseNetworking.com on the promise of Server Based Computing and why it has not been fullfilled (yet): The much touted benefits - low cost, easy manageability, longevity, security and so on - were never enough to convince most organizations that server-based computing would be sufficiently flexible and reliable. There was also the teensiest bit of unspoken suspicion that the whole idea was an anti-Microsoft caper, designed to hurt Redmond's revenues rather than aid potential customers.

Although thin client adoption is still very low (about 6 percent of the commercial desktop market), sales are increasing strongly from this low base, up 22 percent in the first half of 2006 compared to the previous year, according to a recent IDC EMEA study. The signs are that that thin client model may finally be catching on, in a small way at least.

Once reason for this is that there are now more ways than ever to use them. In the past, thin clients have typically been used in conjunction with applications running on a Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix MetaFrame, the classic "server-based computing" model. (In fact MetaFrame has been replaced by Presentation Server 4, which runs on top of Terminal Server.) Now it's also become common to access Web-native applications through a standard browser, which can run on a standard desktop machine or a thin client device.

But that's just the beginning. The blade client model enables users sitting behind thin clients which are little more than smart monitors to run applications on rack-mounted PCs which are physically housed in a data center. Many would argue, however, that this isn't really thin client computing � it's more a case of placing the keyboard, video monitor and mouse in a different location to the PC.

Read the entire article here.