'Dumb Terminals' Can Be a Smart Move for Companies

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "More companies are forgoing desktop and laptop computers for dumb terminals — reversing a trend toward powerful individual machines that has been in motion for two decades, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Because the terminals have no moving parts such as fans or hard drives that can break, the machines typically require less maintenance and last longer than PCs. Mark Margevicius, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc., estimates companies can save 10% to 40% in computer-management costs when switching to terminals from desktops. In addition, the basic terminals appear to offer improved security. Because the systems are designed to keep data on a server, sensitive information isn't lost if a terminal gets lost, stolen or damaged. And if security programs or other applications need to be updated, the new software is installed on only the central servers, rather than on all the individual PCs scattered throughout a network.'"

Sometimes Not Good

[mfh]

We have dumb terminals at work and their caches are always clogged. We are constantly rebooting them. While setting the cache to a larger size is likely a good idea, someone at head-office has the perms to do this, so we have to sit back and stomach it.

Re:How many times have we heard this before?

[Lumpy]

Um.... autozone did it. All dumb terminals in the stores and one linux server.

Works great, and they have a far lower TCO per store than Advance does with their windows based setup. Wyse terminals are dirt cheap. Hell, thin X terminals are dirt cheap compared to a PC running windows for a sales terminal.

Re:Not good for large installations.

[bev_tech_rob]

If you lock down the server and no users have admin rights (except IT), then no danger of viruses, malware, etc. We support over 200 facilities using Citrix (with users either accessing via workstations with only the OS and a Citrix client installed or a thin client (Windows Imbedded), no problems with malware from end users since they don't have rights to install anything. You do have a point about the single point of failure. If one server goes down, many users can be affected. As well as in our case, each site is connected to corporate via a dedicated circuit. If the connection goes down, the site goes down. But our communications vendor actively monitors the connections and immediately starts work to correct outage (which typically only lasts a few minutes)..

Re:We call them thin-clients

[Frankie70]

it's a lot harder for users to really screw things up


It may be a lot harder for the user to screw up hardware,
but I don't see how it makes harder to screw up software.

You can make it harder to screw up software by setting
permissions, but that can be done both on thin or
thick clients.

Re:How many times have we heard this before?

[MindStalker]

Autozone? Yep many retail outlets use dumb terminals especially for computers located at the counter many that double as a POS (Point of Sale.. IE Cash Register). The question is are there companies out there that use dummy terminals for office machines. Oh sure, some do, but its not widespread.

They are fairly popular in call centers

[sczimme]

And, in all that time, I've yet to personally see a company actually doing it.

Obviously such companies must not exist since you have never seen them... (Sorry - I find that logical fallacy quite irksome.)

The new+improved dumb terminals are reasonably popular in call centers. The terminals offer detailed granularity over the limited and very specific needs (including required permissions) of the call center employees.

I have seen terminals that run Linux as well, and appear to be sold with the server and requisite applications as a package.

Re:Not good for large installations.

[tinkerghost]

I think you're a little backwards. This is perfect for large installations - under specific requirements.

1. Competent IT/management
2. Limited variety in software between departments
3. Software writen for thin-client/server environment

Software writen for server or thin-client environments is designed from the ground up to not interfier with other software, so proper software selection goes a long ways towards making sure that this type of project will work at all. Also note that this isn't about completely eliminating workstations/PCs it's about replacing them where it's not needed. Got a secretary pool of 40 and a call center with 200 stations? That's 240 fewer HD's to re-image after a virus gets past your defences. The Secretary for the VP of Marketing still keeps her PC since she is going to have to open/work with image files that no other secretary will.

My last scan of thin-client tech showed that a client server ration of 150:1 is possible for moderate level usage, with it dropping as low as 25:1 for specialized software that's resource intensive. For a 250-300 seat call center, 2 servers can cover the whole floor. Add in the added security of dumb terminals - no vector for USB thumbdrives, floppys, or CD burners to be used to steal data or inject a virus, and the ease of configuring them - usually you either turn them on & DHCP takes care of them or you point them at a server, and it's a winning combination for IT workload and Data Security.

Missed the point

[plopez]

FTA:
Because the terminals have no moving parts such as fans or hard drives that can break, the machines typically require less maintenance and last longer than PCs. Mark Margevicius, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc., estimates companies can save 10% to 40% in computer-management costs when switching to terminals from desktops

The TCO is not in hardware, but in software and support. What makes a PC network so horrendously expensive (Gartner estimated 4K to 10K USD per seat per year at one time) is the army of technicians required to keep them running. Dumb boxes allow centralization of support which is much less expensive. So you spend less on hardware and labor, and use some of those savings for a really, highspeed network and a really reliable server cluster.

BTW, now-a-days this is often pronounced 'Citrix' or 'Remote Desktop'. Same basic principle.

Re:How many times have we heard this before?

[gad_zuki!]

These stories might be plants, but this stuff is out there and it works fine. I think the big holdup is the IT mentality of 'one computer per person' Thin-clients go against the norm and is probably a very hard sell for management, who can only think of things as 'how is this like my home version of windows.'

I did visit one company that ran citrix on every desktop. I believe the desktops were either full blown versions of windows or windows ce. The citrix client ran on top of that and connected to a server on the lan. They all use the same apps anyway so it works out.

Where I work now we run citrix as a remote solution but I dont see any reason why we cant move all of our desktop users to it. Most wouldnt even notice a difference.

These aren't "dumb terminals" (TM LSI)

[argent]

The things they're describing aren't "dumb terminals [decodesystems.com]" (which is a TM of Lear Siegler International), by any stretch of the imagination. They're dumber than Xterms, but they're smarter than any of the "smart terminals" that LSI was competing with.

Re:How many times have we heard this before?

[jm91509]

Sun use sunrays throughout their network. They are stateless terminals with smartcard readers in them. You put your id badge into them and you desktop pops up. This works globally, so if you are normally based in the US and travel to Europe, you just stick your card into a sunray and (after a short pause...) your desktop appears, just as you left it back home. All works perfectly smoothly and mostly hassle free.

http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/faq.xml [sun.com]

Re:How many times... (about SunRays)

[Anonymous Know-It-Al]

Having worked for Sun I must say that this is one of the things I miss the most. Apart from being able to bring your card to any colleague when asking for advice, the absence of noisy fans is really noticable.

Someone who does it

[Anonymous Coward]

Did some consulting at Rothschild where they use dumb terminals (ok, thin clients - whatever) for most users. The big claim that it saves costs doesn't really pan out. Maybe in an 'ideal' implementation it might but in reality when was the last time your boss said 'how much does it cost to do this RIGHT, i'll get you whatever you need'.

So what happened there? Well it was almost a daily excercise to pull servers out of the pool because people couldn't log in. Responsiveness was...medocre. Ok for 'outlook + MS word + one MSIE'. When I opened 5 MSIE windows while doing some research my terminal slowed to a crawl. Forget anything graphics-intensive or video. Sound/USB? Usually worked. Usually. The terminals were small and had no moving parts but pricing wasn't that much more attractive than cheapy desktops today. Plus when one stopped working it was trash. I can swap out PC parts if something goes wrong. Having done desktop for 10+ years I can honestly say their 'desktop' problems (the ones not directly related to being thin clients) were almost entirely the same as every other client i've worked for.

Oh, and the kicker? Eventually they stopped buying the thin terminals and used FULL-SPEC DELL PC's to connect to their terminal servers. WTF?

Oh, and i did see a 'terminal laptop' or two in the junk pile. It's basically an off-brand cheapy laptop with a CF card for a hard drive. Why bother? Its small to carry around but useless outside the office.

Overall, my thin client experience was a thumbs-down. They did *NOT* save money. They did *NOT* lower support requirements. They did *NOT* improve the user experience one iota.

Re:They are fairly popular in call centers

[StormReaver]

"But I mean [dumb terminals] for general office use."

Most of the departments where I work use text-based dumb terminals for most operations. They are actually full PCs with telnet interfaces, but they are essentially dumb terminals. The main reasons we didn't use X-Window terminals were:

1) The bandwidth at the time was limited, and full GUI interfaces saturated our network. With everything now being gigabit fiber, this wouldn't be an issue anymore.

2) Most of our programmers at the time knew nothing about GUI programming. This is still a problem, as all the primary systems are still text based and maintained by those same programmers. The apps are slowly being replaced, but management has allowed some of those apps to be written without consideration for remote execution (C# and C++ Builder, with the latter thankfully being abandoned).

3) Even now, only two of us have any experience with any X-Window toolkits, and only one of us (me) has any extensive experience (Qt). Fortunately for me, I am able to write all my desktop apps with Qt, and I keep remote execution in mind when designing my apps.

4) The cost of X-Window server licenses.

All this took place before I arrived and started introducing Free Software. There is now nothing technical holding us back from basing all our operations on Linux X-Window terminals for most departments, and doing so would be a very smart move. The only obstacle at this point (that I can think of) is scanner support. We are imaging all of our historical documents, and SANE does not support the high volume scanners we use.

Nostalgia

[ajs318]

Ah, the good old days. At Aston Uni, we had mainly VT-220s and QVT-203+s. Some VT-100 clones, too; even at least one real VT-100 with the remotely programmable indicator lights! {Why did they stop putting those on terminals? Even the VT-220s didn't have them, not even emulated on the status line.}

VT-xxx machines were all character-mapped and text-only. But I suppose if you needed graphics, you could have a machine running just a very cut-down OS and X server, straight from ROM.

Re:We call them thin-clients

[genessy]

You are right, but as we're just upgrading to an Active Directory domain from an NT domain, there were a lot less options for setting permissions. The ease of being able to "shadow" users with one click to provide tech support without another bloated software installation is also a definite plus. Hoestly, they're cheaper, easily managed and maintained, and a good choice for any business running centralized applications that don't require a lot of individual processing power. We can't run the whole organization on them. A lot of our users run more intensive programs than I'd like to see on a shared server, but they do serve a purpose and they perform that purpose well.

Re:Not good for large installations.

[Fordiman]

I just priced the following system:
8-core Opteron @ 2.8GHz/2MB Cache per core
128GB RAM
6TB (750GBx8 RAID-0) HD
4-Port Gig Eth (3-ports serving, 1-port internet)

Cost: ~$76k

Number of users I estimate would be well served via VNC:
512 Users would get:
256Mb RAM
1.95G swap
~750Mhz, assuming 5% average CPU time per user
(From Task Manager: 1037952 secs active, 7588 secs CPU time, I work 7 hrs/day, 3 days/wk)
9.76GB storage/user
5.85 MBit to server, 1.95 MBit to internet

cost of a thin client per user: $75, total: $39k

To have an individual desktop per user for 512 people, at $600/cheap workstation, you easily break $300k. So, yeah. Savings.

Run Linux and VNC on it, and you could have the users nicely sandboxed (max. CPU use at 5% or most available, max. RAM use at 512MRAM/3GSwap or most available(whichever's less), strict access controls, no direct hardware access, automatic remote registration of USB/CD) and still let them do things like work on office documents and surf the web in safety.

Re:Home solutions?

[drinkypoo]

Basically ANY X terminal will work with Linux. That's kind of the point of X, or part of it anyway. Try to get one with good color depth (24 bits) because lots of your favorite programs won't work right in 8 bit color and even websurfing is pretty horrendous. Just configure gdm (or kdm, or xdm) to accept XDMCP connections - the man page or other help will tell you precisely how to do this. Then either configure your X terminal to look for connections, or to connect to that machine directly. You can use any PC as an X terminal - including a laptop, as others have suggested; you can get laptops with broken displays but otherwise working very cheaply and hook them up to a cheapie display - still lower power, smaller, and quieter than using anything bigger than a Book PC. Another but much more hardcore option is to use a Sun ELC, which IIRC was the color one (the SLC being 1 bpp, not even greyscale.) There's a project called "Xkernel" (I can't find it any more since some people named their protocol development test suite "x-Kernel", sigh - stop poisoning the namespace!) that lets you netboot it as an X terminal. It's really only good for nerd factor, and the fact that it's cheap as hell. I wouldn't ever buy one without RAM though, because THAT can be expensive :)

VDI

[TheRealFixer]

I've been working a lot in the VDI realm as of late. The concept is using virtualization (usually VMware ESX 2.5 or VI3 w/ VirtualCenter) to create a pool of standalone virtual desktops, a "connection broker" which can dynamically assign users to a particular VM and give them an RDP or VNC connection to it, and a thin client terminal (Wyse's S10 Blazer works well for this).

The Wyse terminal integrates with the connection broker, which handles authentication. Once the user is authenticated, the connection broker assigns the user to one of your virtual workstations and creates a remote desktop session to it on the terminal. The connection broker is responsible for tracking which users are assigned to which VMs. If one crashes, the broker knows about it, removes it from the pool of available workstations, and when the user logs back on they are re-assigned to another VM.

VDI has most all of the benefits of Citrix, like centralization of data and tighter control over user access. There are also some benefits of this over the traditional Terminal Server/Citrix model. One, the user experience is much closer to what they're used to with a regular PC, because they are essentially accessing a fully-featured workstation. Second, you don't have Citrix and Terminal Server weirdnesses, like apps that just won't run in a multi-user environment. Each user's VM, while centralized, is a completely siloed OS instance sharing the resources of the host server. What one user does on their VM typically has much less impact on other users than what can happen in a Citrix environment. With VMware VI3 and their dynamic resource concept, it opens a whole new avenue of dynamic load-balancing between your entire pool of hardware.

There are some downsides, too. A major one is cost. If you're using Windows, you're paying for XP licenses for each user, you're typically paying for VMware licensing for each server, you're paying for thin clients (the S10 is around $300), and you're paying for connection broker licenses. Citrix licensing isn't cheap either, but in my experience, VDI with VMware comes out more expensive. You can typically fit WAY more users per server in the Citrix world than you can with VDI, which adds to your per-user cost for VMware licensing and server hardware. You're also still having to manage individual desktops (although some cool disk streaming products like Ardence can help with this) for patches and new software installs, as opposed to the one-per-sever work you have to do under Citrix.

VDI is still pretty new, but the advancements I've seen just in the past year are making it a pretty exciting world to work in.