IT Trends

Basher · 29 Aug 2008 at 18:12

I'm sure we can all see that thin client based computing is making a bit of a come back due to the cost savings in terms of reduced management and increased security it can bring to organisations. But why did we ever move to thick client? Increased reliance/demands on applications within the business, cheaper desktops?

What else do you see as key trends in the industry going forward?

James

m4cc45 · 29 Aug 2008 at 18:27

I think the trend for virtualisation will go further forward.

By that Microsoft, in Windows 2008, having acquired Soft Grid, have decided to go beyond Server Virtualisation and into Application Virtualisation. This, to us, means that we can move everyone off old archaic platforms for certain applications and move to newer PC's / O/S's / etc.

This isn't just Citrix (delivering applications to desktop) this is emulating on a new level. It takes all of the dependancies from the software and runs it in it's own environment.

More here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx

I still think that PC's will be 'thick' rathter than 'thin' for the reason of software. Gone are the days where we had one or two applications. We have users using AutoCAD / Photoshop / SAS / etc. which need real work horses of PC's. Developers using Visual Studio again require really decent workstations.

For me, the way forward, will be application virtualisation!

M.

Basher · 29 Aug 2008 at 18:30

m4cc45 said:
I think the trend for virtualisation will go further forward.

I still think that PC's will be 'thick' rathter than 'thin' for the reason of software. Gone are the days where we had one or two applications. We have users using AutoCAD / Photoshop / SAS / etc. which need real work horses of PC's. Developers using Visual Studio again require really decent workstations.

For me, the way forward, will be application virtualisation!

M.

But what about all of those users who do just use one or two apps (e.g. call desk) - I think we'll see a mixture of thick and thin in line with the demands of the users.

What are your thoughts on why we initially moved away from thin all those moons ago? Simply due to the increased demand for more complex and a larger number of apps?

James.

Basher · 29 Aug 2008 at 18:54

m4cc45 said:
I think the trend for virtualisation will go further forward.

This isn't just Citrix (delivering applications to desktop) this is emulating on a new level. It takes all of the dependancies from the software and runs it in it's own environment.

How does it differ from Citrix, doesn't Citrix do an element of encapsulation and delivery of apps in their own isolated environments?

BoomAM · 29 Aug 2008 at 19:20

m4cc45 said:
I still think that PC's will be 'thick' rathter than 'thin' for the reason of software. Gone are the days where we had one or two applications. We have users using AutoCAD / Photoshop / SAS / etc. which need real work horses of PC's. Developers using Visual Studio again require really decent workstations.

The HP (and equilivent) desktops blades would sort out that to an extent.
Still allowing a thin client to be client side, but keeping the performance of a desktop. Its basically glorified KVM over IP.
The deal breaker for that imo will be its flexability. Can the thin clients add features such as multiple monitors, for example.

Stelly · 30 Aug 2008 at 07:50

At the moment I think its storage virtualisation more than anything... I have been looking into it, but as usual my company will not spend the money...

Stelly

bigredshark · 30 Aug 2008 at 21:39

BoomAM said:
The HP (and equilivent) desktops blades would sort out that to an extent.
Still allowing a thin client to be client side, but keeping the performance of a desktop. Its basically glorified KVM over IP.
The deal breaker for that imo will be its flexability. Can the thin clients add features such as multiple monitors, for example.

HP blade workstation are already doing dual screens, as can Sun thin clients I believe (or some models at least)

BoomAM · 30 Aug 2008 at 22:22

bigredshark said:
HP blade workstation are already doing dual screens, as can Sun thin clients I believe (or some models at least)

Cool.
Didnt know that. But its things of that ilk that they need to 'push' to make a real dent in the market thats full of fat clients.

m4cc45 · 30 Aug 2008 at 22:26

Basher said:
How does it differ from Citrix, doesn't Citrix do an element of encapsulation and delivery of apps in their own isolated environments?

It's not quite the same thing. Citrix is delivery to desktop. Optomising for bandwidth. It encapsulates the program only for that operating system (i.e. it is O/S dependant). With Citrix you have one application installed and then if you update that application it's update for all clients so its very easy to manage. I've not really gone into XenApp which I believe is similar but not sure on the encapsulation methods whether it can make the App O/S independant.

With Softgrid it doesn't matter what the operating system is. It can run a legacy Windows 98 application on Windows Vista with no compatibility issues. It can also do the application delivery (like Citrix) so you can deliver to desktop / run off the server / installed on the client PC.

With regards to the thick / thin debate. I still think it will be thick. There will be a mixture dependant upon the company (i.e. call centres who only use one application). I know in the past 10 years I've been working in IT I can't remember any one person who's had less than 10 applications in use. Even with user support. You have e-mail, internet, helpdesk system, active directory, windows explorer, crystal reporting tools and many more. You could adopt a Citrix approach and run them all off the server but this would mean investing in a Citrix Farm (and you'd need redundancy as well as if one server goes down, that's it, no one can work).

It's much easier to do everything at the client. If it breaks we replace the PC and everything is delivered via the AD.

I really am excited by Windows 2008 - we should hopefully be using it come the beginning of next year in production.

M.

bigredshark · 30 Aug 2008 at 22:56

BoomAM said:
Cool.
Didnt know that. But its things of that ilk that they need to 'push' to make a real dent in the market thats full of fat clients.

It's really growing, exceptionally popular with traders and financial organizations. Traders like them because you get noisy and heat generating PCs off the trading floor, IT like them because it means data never leaves the data-center.

Downside, the blade workstations are still frighteningly expensive...

bigredshark · 30 Aug 2008 at 23:03

m4cc45 said:
With regards to the thick / thin debate. I still think it will be thick. There will be a mixture dependant upon the company (i.e. call centres who only use one application). I know in the past 10 years I've been working in IT I can't remember any one person who's had less than 10 applications in use. Even with user support. You have e-mail, internet, helpdesk system, active directory, windows explorer, crystal reporting tools and many more. You could adopt a Citrix approach and run them all off the server but this would mean investing in a Citrix Farm (and you'd need redundancy as well as if one server goes down, that's it, no one can work).

It's much easier to do everything at the client. If it breaks we replace the PC and everything is delivered via the AD.

M.

I have to say I disagree, think clients will still run exactly the same number of Apps on the remote server (and of your listed apps, email, web and helpdesk system are likely just tabs in IE today...).

The only people who need a thick client are people doing work on graphics or similar. Or inputing data through something other than a keyboard (you can pipe a scanner through to thin client session but it's not pretty).

Otherwise it's difficult to find a reason to use thick clients. You're going to be load balancing the sessions over multiple servers (probably multiple locations too) and thin clients don't break much so reliability is much improved. There are ample studies out there showing the much reduced support costs of thin client environments.

It also keeps sensitive data on the servers rather than user desktops which is a big plus. Aside from a high initial cost I find it difficult to find reasons not to move to thin clients myself.

J1nxy · 30 Aug 2008 at 23:17

There are actually quiet a few reasons for not moving to just a thin client solution, these become particularly apparent when you start to factor in the whole end to end solution and the associated costs involved.

If you combine the use of thick and thin client desktops, applicaiton virtulisation, managed desktop OS, VDI and server side computing then you can come up with a solution which is not only cost effective but also delivers the most import thing...the user experience.

There is no single silver bullet or holy grail for any of this, what we have now is a whole bunch of enabling technologies which when used in the right combination and the right situation can do some pretty impressive things.

BoomAM · 1 Sep 2008 at 19:00

bigredshark said:
Downside, the blade workstations are still frighteningly expensive...

True.
I think it came to just over £18k for basically 30 computers when i looked into it.
Compared to just shy of 8k for 30 thick clients.

Shaz]sigh[ · 1 Sep 2008 at 19:21

Servers have been virtualised, applications have been virtualised and storage has been virtualised. The boat has sailed and fallen off the earth (as it's flat don't you know).

It's all about the cloud "babeh". Cloud computing is the huge buzz of last year and this year and although it has been a tad slow to take off fully (economic climate!), it appears to be the way of the future.

m4cc45 · 1 Sep 2008 at 19:39

bigredshark said:
I have to say I disagree, think clients will still run exactly the same number of Apps on the remote server (and of your listed apps, email, web and helpdesk system are likely just tabs in IE today...).

The only people who need a thick client are people doing work on graphics or similar. Or inputing data through something other than a keyboard (you can pipe a scanner through to thin client session but it's not pretty).

Otherwise it's difficult to find a reason to use thick clients. You're going to be load balancing the sessions over multiple servers (probably multiple locations too) and thin clients don't break much so reliability is much improved. There are ample studies out there showing the much reduced support costs of thin client environments.

It also keeps sensitive data on the servers rather than user desktops which is a big plus. Aside from a high initial cost I find it difficult to find reasons not to move to thin clients myself.

It's good to find a differing opinion. The reason why I say we won't go thin is because the applications running are basically thick frontends. We don't use any Web Apps for the applications mentioned. Security won't be improved as they are running on SQL backends for the most of it with all documents stored on servers - none copied to desktop - my documents redirected to servers as well. If we did make the environment thin they would be running on servers. Load balanced all the same, perhaps even a cluster. This would not neccessarily improve reliability. If an application breaks on one server then this server needs to be repaired. This is great if you have several but if you have two then all the people on one server need to be moved over and when people are potentially dealing with millions you don't want this to happen. Again it could be gotten around by buying a lot of servers but this incurs massive costs not just hardware wise but software wise. CAL's, O/S's then the application licence and there CAL's.

Then to get the applications as you suggest say delivered to desktop via Citrix (and just to be argumentative we say we want this done each time the user logs on for security reasons) then the 256kb links that some of the branches have would just die. Yes you could have distribution servers in the branches but this further pushes up the costs. The only way I could see this sort of thing working is via terminal services but then you are just adding another layer on top of that. The user logs in to Windows then logs in to Terminal Services reports from Helpdesk Team saying the user doesn't know which Windows she is using or why aren't my icons here. It's more trouble for the end user I guess.

I'd say it will still be thick until we can develop all of the applications to use a web browser. When that day comes then we would move to thin but I can't see it anytime soon mainly due to how some of our key applications run (thick client and SQL backend rather than using IIS as most of the processing is done on the client side).

We would also have to make provisions for if the branch is down. If this is the case then using some systems without distrbution servers we would be dead in the water currently we can still work.

M.

J1nxy · 1 Sep 2008 at 22:12

m4cc45 said:
It's good to find a differing opinion. The reason why I say we won't go thin is because the applications running are basically thick frontends. We don't use any Web Apps for the applications mentioned. Security won't be improved as they are running on SQL backends for the most of it with all documents stored on servers - none copied to desktop - my documents redirected to servers as well. If we did make the environment thin they would be running on servers. Load balanced all the same, perhaps even a cluster. This would not neccessarily improve reliability. If an application breaks on one server then this server needs to be repaired. This is great if you have several but if you have two then all the people on one server need to be moved over and when people are potentially dealing with millions you don't want this to happen. Again it could be gotten around by buying a lot of servers but this incurs massive costs not just hardware wise but software wise. CAL's, O/S's then the application licence and there CAL's.

Then to get the applications as you suggest say delivered to desktop via Citrix (and just to be argumentative we say we want this done each time the user logs on for security reasons) then the 256kb links that some of the branches have would just die. Yes you could have distribution servers in the branches but this further pushes up the costs. The only way I could see this sort of thing working is via terminal services but then you are just adding another layer on top of that. The user logs in to Windows then logs in to Terminal Services reports from Helpdesk Team saying the user doesn't know which Windows she is using or why aren't my icons here. It's more trouble for the end user I guess.

I'd say it will still be thick until we can develop all of the applications to use a web browser. When that day comes then we would move to thin but I can't see it anytime soon mainly due to how some of our key applications run (thick client and SQL backend rather than using IIS as most of the processing is done on the client side).

We would also have to make provisions for if the branch is down. If this is the case then using some systems without distrbution servers we would be dead in the water currently we can still work.

M.

I think your miss understanding the delivery of apps via citrix...

m4cc45 · 2 Sep 2008 at 06:19

I was actually just being predantic on the security front as to having the app removed everytime the user shut down the PC. Why? Because if you have the application on there then this is a point of entry for any would be hacker / thief.

But even so if we didn't do that (i.e. delivered to desktop once or sent the common applications to be stored on the PC such as Office) then the applications would, at some point, have to be sent over the WAN to PC's when they wanted to use them or when the PC was switched on or whatever. Yes you can update them out of hours but you will always miss a couple (mainly due to powercuts or works on the circuits, etc.).

I know Citrix uses compression which is great. But there is still a lot of data that has to travel down the lines.

For me the cost to reward ratio is very high.

M.

J1nxy · 2 Sep 2008 at 06:25

Your still not understanding delivery of applications via Citrix Xen App. XenApp is an extension to Terminal Services. The application is centrally hosted and the display, keyboard/mouse and a few other bits are sent between server/device.

What you are talking about is the streaming side of Xen App (which is very poor compared to Softgrid/MS App Virtualisation)

But then you are talking about a point of entry for hackers/thievies? So you don't have authentication on your PCs or your applications? I think thats a bigger security risk than having the client installed on a machine, and having no security/authentication in your OS/apps will fail just about any audit...

m4cc45 · 2 Sep 2008 at 16:13

No there is security on the applications as well. I was referring to the distribution of Xenapps - the main reason being is that the applications have to run in offline mode when the links go down.

The entry point would be the authentication on the PC then application.

M.

bigredshark · 3 Sep 2008 at 15:51

m4cc45 said:
No there is security on the applications as well. I was referring to the distribution of Xenapps - the main reason being is that the applications have to run in offline mode when the links go down.

The entry point would be the authentication on the PC then application.

M.

IF you're talking about trends though then that argument is pretty void, increasingly WAN connectivity is a must have, it can't go down and there will be a proportionate increase in connection speed and redundency to match (arguably already has been, most of our big clients are on fully diverse fibre circuits these days - different carriers, different routes, different equipment.)