Imagining most of the corporate environments I’ve seen… Desktop PCs on every desk, users mostly use Office software or some business applications, and security policies don’t allow saving files on the local disk.
Asked how to reduce the fixed costs and consolidating servers, my first question usually is: “Does everyone really need his/her own desktop computer?”
Why am I asking? Corporate Desktop PCs produce a lot of costs. You need to replace them every 3-4 years, you need to maintain the OS and the software installed on them, they consume a good amount of power to display spreadsheets and text documents, they need space, and produce noise as well as heat.
Do not underestimate the heat! We noticed that after some of our customers switched their old CRTs with new shiny TFTs the room temperature went down, considerably. Ok, this slightly increased the heating bill in winter but the savings on cooling the office space during summer were higher.
Replacing the Desktop PCs with Thin Clients will have roughly the same effect.
“But wait. Replacing all of the computers with thin clients will not be accepted by the users!”
Are you sure?
Companies are not a democracy. If the users have no choice they will accept the new thin client strategy, if they want to keep their jobs.
On the other hand companies try to squeeze out the last cent out of every investment before turning to new one.
So, what will it cost?
Now, that depends largely on the software you use, how much you spend on your average corporate desktop, and which kind of solution you’re targeting.
Yes, there’s more than one way to thin down your computers.
The classic approach would be a terminal server solution. All applications and the desktops run on a shared terminal server which can host roughly up to 80 users (depends on applications and server size).
Or you could go with the virtualization hype and provide a virtual machine for every user which more or less behaves like the common desktop computer, only it’s running on a large server farm.
Alternatively you also could use application streaming where preconfigured packages of application are synchronized with the application server but running locally. This could be an intermediate solution for existing desktops or used for traveling users on a notebook.
Ultimately, if you need to provide high performance graphic applications like CAD or DTP tools you now can bind a whole blade server to a thin client. This is the most costly solution, but enables your users to work on his/her machine from any of these thin clients while the system itself is secured in the datacenter.
This is the place where you start saving money. All of the solutions above focus on concentrating the user environment in a place where it can be managed most efficiently: Your datacenter.
You won’t need highly trained IT personnel spread across the globe to maintain your desktop computers. I’m not saying you should lay them off, but they can remotely manage the centralized infrastructure. Think of it like a 24h server system administration plan with the people you already have. These people can keep your server running, so the users can work with the remote desktop environment.
If a thin client breaks, someone just has to plug in a new one and all is set. If you have to shut down one server the sessions can be relocated to another, which reduces critical downtimes.
Since all of the computing power is concentrated in a single place you won’t need local servers in every branch office, outlet, site, whateveryoucallit. This will save money for the hardware, system maintenance, and will simplify your backup strategy.
And the best part: All data, documents, files, etc are stored in a (hopefully) safe place with periodic backups. Just imagine never having to search a broken harddrive for that crucially important Excel file, which should have been stored on the department file share in the first place, again.