Thick vs Thin

Shelster · 9 Apr 2019 at 13:40

Have been tasked in work to come up with a design for a stand alone network that will be used for connecting 50 terminals to a server that is running a proprietary maintenance management database / planning tool.

The infrastructure is pretty well set in stone as is utilising an existing fibre network that was installed previously and is not being used, so am now at the point of deciding between thick or thin clients. At present the server has not been specified and am aware that the specs for this will be influenced by the decision on the clients.

From the info I have, the clients will not be running any other software other than this maintenance management, so am weighing up options.

Throrik · 9 Apr 2019 at 15:54

Until you know what the infrastructure is going to be you can't really say - you need to know if the infrastructure to run say an RDS Farm or Horizon or Citrix outweighs the cost of 50x thick clients, does the software support thin clients etc.

#Chri5# · 9 Apr 2019 at 16:45

Also what's the budget for both building the system and then supporting it?

glenimp617 · 10 Apr 2019 at 13:24

I'm a big fan of thin clients, been working with them for over 15 years. That said, it's not for everyone and needs careful consideration and planning.

BongoHunter · 10 Apr 2019 at 15:08

How much desk space do the operators have? What is the level of technical literacy? Do you have a support function already supporting thick clients? Budget would be useful.

You mention fibre - is this to the client? Or is it just to local switches and regular ethernet from there?

Shelster · 16 Apr 2019 at 16:17

Thanks for the input guys.

Have decided to go down the route of using thick clients, but will use mini PCs that can be hidden behind monitors. Main reason is to keep this cheap (I did some looking into the licencing requirements for thin clients and was a wee bit surprised) and also for when it is in service, it needs to be as easy to administer as possible as am not 100% sure what the level of the admin will be (will not be me, I know that)

Is in the very early stages of development and the last time user positions came up they bandied around using laptops. Am going to steer them away from this idea. The mention of fibre is just the backbone of the network we will be using. Consists of 3 x 4 core multi-mode fibres that have multiple breakout points. Each point will have a 24 port switch in there-fibre connected into backbone and then copper out to the user.

Server wise, does not have to be anything major. Needs to run AD, DC, DNS and DHCP (although I will be assigning static IP's it has to be able to cope with future growth that does not have tech savvy people looking after it. Other than above, needs an application / database server. My thoughts are to have two VM's running on one machine. 1 will cover the AD, DC side of things and the other for the application.