Comment We've come full circle but... (Score 1) 206
Thin clients don't have to mean less power available at the desktop, infact when coupled with VMware or other virtualisation technology thin clients can be as powerful as any on-the-desk solution.
The problems I hear mentioned here about network outages causing company wide problems in terms of disruption are just silly, any decent enterprise these days has a resilient network, I can't remember the last time we had a system wide network outage, they just don't exist anymore, any outage is limited to possibly a single department or other localised area of the network.
I'm currently in the middle of rolling out Sun Ray ultra thin clients for an enterprise I'm employed with, over 800 desktops at one site alone and for ease of management UTC can't be matched. When combined with NetApp it's a simple case of restoring a machine from a snap clone if a user screws up his desktop, takes minutes and the support techies don't even need to leave their desks.
Then there is the green thing, why pay for CPUs, memory and hard disks at each and every users desk, the majority of which are less than half utilised? Thin client solutions are almost always more efficient in terms of energy use and with the rising price of energy these days an enterprise can save a fortune in its annual energy consumption.
So the thin client is about cost and ease of management, not just about restricting end users abilities, hell we even have a software development team using UTC and if they felt restricted I can assure you they'd moan!
The problems I hear mentioned here about network outages causing company wide problems in terms of disruption are just silly, any decent enterprise these days has a resilient network, I can't remember the last time we had a system wide network outage, they just don't exist anymore, any outage is limited to possibly a single department or other localised area of the network.
I'm currently in the middle of rolling out Sun Ray ultra thin clients for an enterprise I'm employed with, over 800 desktops at one site alone and for ease of management UTC can't be matched. When combined with NetApp it's a simple case of restoring a machine from a snap clone if a user screws up his desktop, takes minutes and the support techies don't even need to leave their desks.
Then there is the green thing, why pay for CPUs, memory and hard disks at each and every users desk, the majority of which are less than half utilised? Thin client solutions are almost always more efficient in terms of energy use and with the rising price of energy these days an enterprise can save a fortune in its annual energy consumption.
So the thin client is about cost and ease of management, not just about restricting end users abilities, hell we even have a software development team using UTC and if they felt restricted I can assure you they'd moan!
