Current Trends
My goal for this article was to interview companies that have thin client/server technology in production. Therefore, the companies I've profiled aren't a representative sample of the entire IS industry, or even the NT market. Windows NT Magazine surveys show that the majority of NT shops are still skeptical about thin-client technology. The primary question these skeptics ask is, "Does it work?" This article answers that question with real-world evidence from IS professionals with TCSC in production. To begin, here is a summary of trends in these thin-client implementations. The trends fall into four categories: environments, total cost of ownership (TCO), setup and configuration, and support.
Environments. Because Terminal Server was not available until June 1998, most thin client/server installations in production today use Citrix WinFrame 1.7. All the administrators I interviewed said that they would upgrade to Terminal Server for its NT 4.0 application support and interface. In addition, the administrators all said they would upgrade to MetaFrame. They gave me four reasons for this decision, the most important being MetaFrame's ICA support. Each installation uses a portion of its thin client/server solution in a remote environment, and the administrators reported that ICA offers a significant remote performance advantage over RDP. The second reason for adding MetaFrame is its shadowing feature. Third, many of the administrators I interviewed chose an NC device that supported additional protocols to allow connectivity to UNIX and IBM hosts. Such NC devices support only ICA. Finally, the MetaFrame load-balancing feature lets you cluster multiple Terminal Server servers. With this capability, you can create an application server farm to provide failover and load balancing. Currently, Terminal Server does not natively support load balancing; however, you can purchase Balanced Cluster Service (BCS), an RDP load-balancing solution from Cubix, or use the simple IP rotary solution Douglas Toombs outlines in "Load Sharing for Your Web Server," April 1998.
Reduced TCO. Many factors go into calculating TCO, but the most significant are administration, maintenance, software distribution, and user futzing. All the administrators I interviewed cited a substantial reduction in the costs associated with these four factors in their TCSC implementations, and this reduction has significantly reduced TCO. Although none of the administrators has done a formal or scientific study of TCO, they can easily give examples of how their thin client/server environments required only a quarter to a third of the administrative resources of a similarly configured PC environment.
An additional factor in TCO is hardware price. No one I interviewed complained about the costs associated with large servers, and no one complained about the cost of terminals, although in some cases thin-client terminals cost almost as much as PCs. The consensus is that the reduced TCO of TCSC is well worth the hardware costs.
Although reduced TCO balances hardware and software costs for these administrators, some think Terminal Server's price is too high. Others complain about buying a copy of NT Workstation for every thin-client device, although they might not use the devices simultaneously. Still other administrators complain about the price of MetaFrame, saying that although they need ICA features, they think the product's price tag is too high.
Setup and configuration. All the administrators spent time configuring their networks, servers, and applications. However, after they configured their thin client/server environment correctly, the environment was relatively easy to support. The biggest configuration challenge these administrators reported was getting 16-bit applications to work correctly. The second biggest challenge was getting 32-bit applications to work correctly. The lesson here is that you can find off-the-shelf application configuration support from many suppliers, but your custom applications might present your biggest configuration challenge, because, with them, you're on your own.
The administrators commonly use Citrix load balancing or IP rotary balancing to create application server farms or clusters. The farms provide failover clustering, in which a working server takes over a failed server's load. Applications replicate across nodes in the cluster, so the administrators need to install applications on only one server in the cluster. The other servers in the cluster run realtime replication software that automatically distributes the application across the remaining nodes. No software is required for the client devices; therefore, upgrading 1000 users to a new version of Microsoft Office in 2 hours is possible. Several of the administrators I interviewed accomplished such upgrades.
Support. The consensus among the administrators I interviewed is that your supplier must have Citrix WinFrame experience. An experienced supplier can guide you through developing a solid architecture, setup, and configuration. Why WinFrame experience? Because Terminal Server is too new for suppliers to have any depth of experience with it. The best Terminal Server suppliers gained their experience with WinFrame; the ideal supplier is someone with Terminal Server, WinFrame, and MetaFrame experience.
Future Trends
When IS managers start talking to one another about their success with TCSC, this technology will increase in popularity. I have a few observations and speculations about where TCSC will go in the future, if TCSC takes off.
Unlike PCs, thin-client devices often hide CPU type or speed from the IS professional. A 50MHz PowerPC processor, for example, would be pathetic as an NT Workstation-based PC but is more than adequate as a Windows-based terminal. Some interesting partnerships are forming in the Windows-based terminals market. First, Intel has joined with Network Computing Devices (NCD) to manufacture the next generation of Intel-based Windows-based terminals. Motorola has joined with Neoware Systems to produce a PowerPC-based Windows-based terminal.
Why are two of the largest chip manufacturers getting involved with Windows-based terminals? Over time, Windows-based terminal suppliers will continue to reduce the size of the terminals and their cost. Eventually, the guts of a terminal might be no bigger than a CPU and stuffed inside a keyboard or perhaps a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)-sized device. Motorola, for example, could leverage its existing terminal and wireless technologies to create a suite of wireless thin-client devices to use for a myriad of data-capturing situations.
Currently, terminal manufacturers are producing Windows CE-based and proprietary operating system (OS) devices. The licensing fee for Windows CE can run as high as $25 per unit, which is a significant portion of the overall device cost. In contrast, terminal vendors have long had their own OSs, which add only pennies to the overall price of a terminal. If RDP does not perform as well as ICA, ICA will continue to dominate as the terminal protocol of choice, and suppliers will continue to use their proprietary OSs at a reduced cost. If RDP performs at least as well as ICA in all situations, Windows CE devices will eventually dominate. However, ICA supports so many OSs that Windows CE will find it impossible to replace all of them in the foreseeable future.
ICA performance and features are crucial to the long-term success of Citrix. RDP performance and features are crucial to the success of Windows-based (RDP-only) terminals. The race is on. May the best vendor win.
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