The Future of Thin-Client Computing

An obesity crisis in the making: thin is good, slim is better, fat is best

For years I have been a fan of the ‘free, open source software/terminal server/disk-less terminal’ model of computing. I am obsessed with the  absurdly large savings on software, licences, maintenance and energy consumption that are there for the having.

I am not alone. Since January, more and more recession-driven education and public sector personnel have been asking me about the latest 'new' (and now fully buzzword-compliant) computing paradigm known as 'thin-client'. I guess the word has got out at last that PCs are a tad overkill.

Dutifully I describe to them how it works, how simple it all is to install new software, how much money will be saved, how little maintenance is needed and of course just how 'green' a sub-20 watt terminal is compared to its 500 watt sibling we call the Fat-Client (how non-PC of us).

Duly impressed (what bean counter wouldn't be with 90% off the bill), demonstrations follow. They work fine; 'Office' suites crack along, e-mail and web go really well too. A sale is close.

And then the problems sneak out of the wood-work. Comments like these: "It doesn't seem to run BBC iPlayer TV when the whole class logs on for a lesson" or "the video editing software we installed is really really slow". Sound familiar?

OK, so 'they' are being totally unreasonable in that they are having the exact same expectations of the terminal as they would have of a room full of high specification PCs. This expectation issue is especially vexatious if they have bought a load of very capable 'high end' terminals rather than the cheapo low end terminals of which few expect too much (and nor it must be said do they desire them much either).

Saying something like ''you won't be able to do all the things you would like to'' is a cold shower when an entire industry has devoted its marketing muscle to raising expectations beyond sanity. Why else would anyone invest in a monster PC just to run a bloated and slow operating system like Vista?

So far so bad. I've painted myself into 'no-sale' corner to anyone other than the eco-nuts and the impecunious. But I still love the model and I'm not letting go. I want my cake and eat it!

New Developments

Thankfully technology does not stand still whether it is hardware or software (especially in the Open Source world) and a mash-up of new developments look very promising indeed.

Recently I have experimenting with my favourite new PC, namely Asus' Atomic powered Eee Box. It's really rather good and at 20 watts draws no more power than a terminal.

Aha, it'll make a good thin client then, and so it does. Actually it's a crackingly good thin-client with 1gb RAM, 1000 mps network connection, tiny footprint and £200 price point. Under real world testing it goes very well but ultimately its speed is limited in the thin-client model by the terminal server and the network to which it is connected.

For the last sentence read "raised expectations meets thin-client limitations = slight disappointment".

Not necessarily....

Linux distributions as we know can be made very lean and mean. Fully-featured distributions such as DSL Linux, Xubuntu and Puppy Linux are tiny, and run speedily in paltry amounts of RAM on modest processors. Such distros fair scream along on a relatively high spec PC such as the Eee Box.

So If you allow yourself, say, a more generous 200-500mb for the Linux distro (including applications), you still have a neat compact image, which if you have gigabit Ethernet throughout, takes only a very few seconds to download from an image-server onto a client.

Voila the Disk-less Fat Client.

This is a cool idea. You have all the low maintenance of a server - client model and all the benefits of running applications locally. These include mounting all and sundry USB and SD drives reliably, big heavy stuff like Google Earth runs fine and so on. You don't need a big server either as it is only really supplying images on request. I suspect another Eee Box will suffice. OK I go too far but at least the old terminal server can carry on a bit longer.

We're working on it right now. We made the wireless PXE booting thin-client netbook in the autumn and coming soon is the Disk-less Fat Client.

I still love the terminal. I will love it even more when I can say to the customer, "yeah, it'll do that".