Thinning Clients can be good if you are a diet doctor, but bad if you sell deep fried butter wrapped in bacon on a stick.
But I'm not talking about that kind of client. "Thin Clients" have been around for 50 years, and have always been the most cost effective way of cyber-fusing a stationary workforce with a central computer system, but until now it was not a practical way to give a true, multi-purpose, productivity driven personal computer to a large number of people. For that, we've always needed a network of managed, but self contained personal computers to provide this.
In the 1990's I was the IT director of a call center that had 200 people all running the same exact application. During this time the market was flooded with large caches of second hand dumb terminals, and we were bying mint-condition WYSE-50 and VT-100 units for as low as $10 each.
Two hundred of these units could be connected to a single 75Mhz 486 with 8 MB RAM running SCO unix, and with a single X-Base (dBMan) program that allowed that many sales reps to access the database, things usually moved along quite nicely (For those of you who can't say when Twitter started, a 75MHz 486 computer with 8 MB RAM has about as much computing power as an iPod).
In the early 00's I worked at another 200 seat call center that was a true customer management operation for one of the first internet banks. In this case, the employees of the call center needed more than just a dumb terminal with access to a single application, and when we proposed a Windows 2000 based solution (Servers and Workstations), the executives thought that was a really good idea until they found out what that was going to cost in licensing fees.
The asked our department to find an alternative and we quickly latched on to NC's, or Network Computers. These were small, ordinary Intel-based computers with all-in-one motherboards (which was unusual at that time), and only a CD-ROM to boot from; no hard drive. The "Central Application" was accessed by NetScape, and personel who needed additional productivity tools had access to the complete Star Office suite, Telnet-3270 (for access to the banking network), and other things.
We had everything running perfectly when the FDIC shut down the operation for failing some kind of regulatory banking test back at the home office in Boca.
Anyway, most of the IT staff got jobs elsewhere, but I managed to find a way to start my own business. It grew, failed, grew, crashed, grew, shrank, grew, blew to pieces, and grew some more. Apparantly thats how it is for most small businesses. I didn't know that. I was expecting to be rich in 6 months and then spend the rest of my life living like Mark Zuckerberg.
Getting back to the point, there was a time when we had 90 people here with Microsoft XP workstations, and we were raking in buckets of money (how do you rake a bucket?) so when we shrank to 30, then 15, and then 3 people we had no shortage of extra parts. Then, in the last couple of years, we feebly swelled to 5, 10, 15, and now actually have over 30 people back in their chairs. After more than half a decade of feeding from the same storage room filled with battlefield wreckage, hardware supplies are beginning to run thin. Sure, I have five monitors on my desk, and 3 computers under it (linked to the same keyboard and mouse using a very cool utility called "Synergy") but I'm the brains of this operation so I need them. I'm like the United Nations. I have all the big ideas (as in "Hey, what's the big idea?"), therefore certain rules regarding waste and inefficiency should not apply to me.
But when I set up my last functional employee workstation, I had to call Ed to get some prices on some new ones. I also needed his help bringing my old infrastructure back up to speed. In the years of decline, several systems, such as our Name Server, had simply stopped working (You don't really need a name server, not really. Everyone knows you can use Verizon's. Ask any IT guy, what are the IP addresses of Verizon's three name servers, and 9 out of 10 will know them by heart. The 1 who doesn't just hasn't memorized them yet).
So, and I promise I'm getting to the point of this story, Ed told me two things. First, he told me that just before everything when to hell in a hand basket, he had "Virtualized" all of my servers. This means that he had taken the images, (like the "souls") out of each one of the noisy machines in the computer room, and brought them to life inside one super-powerful monster computer (which was half the size of one of the old ones), kind of like the Matrix. Actually, more like Tron. Matrix would not really be an accurate metaphor because in Tron, Flynn is actually inside the computer, whereas in the Matrix ...
Sorry...
So all of the web servers and database servers and ... secret servers .. and other things that had been racked and stacked in the computer room, sucking up energy, shouting "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH" 24 hours a day, and constantly threatening to fail, were now immortal souls living inside one super jumbo deluxe server that was far less prone to failure because it was really really expensive (and has thus likely paid for itself many times over).
I had been wondering why nothing had failed in 3 years. Keeping all of my servers alive used to seem like a crushing responsibility. Every morning it was my ritual to roll out of bed and immediately check to make sure that all of my servers were alive and healthy. It was a stressful experience every once in a while when one of them would fail to open a remote destktop or respond to a ping. Whenever that happened, it was instantly going to be a bad day for everyone.
"Something's wrong with one of my servers." I would announce to my wife, in order to let her understand that I was not going to be participating in the wake-ups/breakfast/dressing/lunches/backpacks/boogars and hurry-up-were'-lates. And I might not even be able to do the school drop-offs which means that all of that is going to be entirely on her this fine day, and for that, she would proceed to find ways to make my morning predicament five times more painful than it otherwise would be.
But it was true. Nothing had failed in 3 years. I had assumed that it was due to the lowered pressure from having less business, but still, no, it was true. None of my servers had failed in 3 years because they CAN'T fail any more. They are Virtual now. They are basically Immortal.
The second thing Ed told me, or asked me, was "How about using a Thin Client"?
I didn't think because I knew. "No." I said.
"Why not?"
"Because the agents have to be able to run a VB.net app and be able to read and write Excel spreadsheets off of the network drive, and they have to be able to run a specific version Windows Media Player to listen to phone calls in high speed. Plus, I'd have to buy another server to host all of the desktops."
Those were all deal breakers for Ed's suggestion, I thought. Ed said that he was coming over to show me something.
When he arrived, he was carrying a box which I suspect contained a small PC. It was actually just a standard flat panel monitor and keyboard. We struggled with a desk and a power supply and coughed because of some dust and crawled around on the floor looking for a network jack. I stood up and hacked up a furball. Ed reached up from where he was still crouched in the corner behind the desk and handed me a little gadget about the size of a pack of cigarrettes. It was covered with connectors.
"Cool," I said, not very interested in Ed's latest geek toy. "Is this some kind of universal adapter?"
"No. That's the Thin Client." Ed said, matter-of-factly.
There was this Matrixxy warping of the universe around me as I took another look at the weightless little lump of plastic and metal in my hand. All of the "connectors" were the things that what you would normally see on the front and back of a big PC: USB ports, VGA, the new wierd VGA, ethernet, and microphone and speaker Jacks. Microphone and Speaker Jacks.
I said something naughty. "What about the host?" I asked.
"You already have one. The ESX server that is hosting all of your virtual servers has more than enough power to run a room full of these."
The Thin Client he had selected for me was one of several different types that he had been working with. This particular one fired up with light blue screen that gave way to a normal looking Windows desktop, but it couldn't do very much on it's own. At that point, Ed clicked an Icon on the desktop and the screen shifted to a more familar Windows XP login. This was coming from the big server downstairs. From that point on, everything you might see or do with this workstation would actually be happening inside a virtual desktop, within a virtual server. It was almost exactly the same has having a conventional network PC.
Even Windows Media Player worked, and fed the audio to the little Thin Client's analog speakers.
It started to dawn on me that this might actually be more than just a less-expensive workstation (one which, I might add, doesn't even need to be plugged in if you have a near by USB port to power it), it is a completely solid state appliance, almost break-down proof, and certainly tamper-proof. Our aging Windows XP workstations on the floor are doomed to start failing one by one over the next couple of years. As the last IT guy on site, that is a prospect that I'm dreading a little bit, but now, if I replace each failed PC with one of these little darlings, over time that will be all we have in here. A Maintenence Free work center, all Windows XP or Windows 7 desktops, plugged into virtually immortal servers.
That means as we grow, I won't have to hire a technician to fix anything. I'll be able to hand it entirely by myself, no matter how big we get. When God gave us the Optical Mouse, you can't imagine how easier my job as a Call Center Computer Guy got. I would estimate that 20% of my time was spent cleaning Mouse Balls. This is that times a thousand. No more PC crashes, no more viruses, no more getting yelled at by my wife because she has to be a single mom for a day.
I started dreaming about all of the writing and coding that I would be getting done. Twenty minutes later I found that I had been sucked into SodaHead and was leaving an incendiary comment to someone about Christmas Trees ... D'OH.
