| Wireless Brings Back Thin Clients |
| Thursday, 13 July 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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A few years ago, thin clients were all the rage. Leading the charge was Sun Microsystems, driven perhaps by a disdain for Microsoft, but many others were producing a variety of thin-client products on both the client and server sides. While stationary thin clients never really caught on, I became - and remain - a proponent of wireless thin clients. Now, I'll grant that anyone who's ever had a dropped call or experienced the high degree of variability in data throughput that's endemic to most wide-area (cellular) wireless networks probably thinks that moving to the thin-client model for mobile computing is just plain nuts. But let me explain. If you've not experienced thin-client computing, it's very simple. It's just like using any other computer but with the processing and data on the server side of the network, and the clients looking and acting very similarly to the familiar Windows-based interface that we've all come to adopt. The idea is that one shouldn't care where one's data or processor is; all we need to know is that we'll have access wherever and whenever we need it, with the same degree of utility and responsiveness that we have in a more classic client/server implementation. And, indeed, on a hard-wired LAN connection, the thin approach should work just fine. There are many examples of successful thin implementations, and companies like Citrix, Hewlett-Packard and Wyse have been doing just fine in the thin-client business for some time. Microsoft has also been offering Windows Terminal Server. But there's a fly in the ointment here. In the office, we have continuous, essentially predictable throughput. On wireless, we don't. What happens when someone needs connectivity to run a vital application but can't get it? This is the counterpoint to the vision I outlined above, and it's a more than valid point. Thin-client mobile computing can't work until there's a critical mass of wireless connectivity, at least where a given worker needs to be most of the time. And there is one other benefit of a mobile thin-client strategy - security. I'm sure you've heard about the bozos who stored critical, live and unsecured data on their notebooks, only to have these computers stolen and the data potentially compromised. In a thin-client world, information is fundamentally secure, and that's another major incentive for adopting this strategy as wireless coverage becomes, if not ubiquitous, at least reliable. Read the entire article here.
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