This week sees the beginning of my one month pilot to completely use a thin client in a pilot project for my company. The thin client software comes from an education thin client provider in Georiga, ACS, and is very affordable. For the cost of the client software and a decent thin client, Aleutia as an example, I can compute for under $500 at the desktop running Linux and using M$FT Windows applications off of the server.
My current setup includes a 4 year old Dell laptop, Ubuntu 8.10 and the IDS native Linux client. My server profile includes all of the M$FT Office 2007 suite, IE 7.0, Firefox 3.04, Pandion Instant Messaging, Adobe, etc. The pilot server is an old Dell desktop that is about 4 years old as well. It is all running on a 10/100 network and streaming audio and video are not considered.
So far so good. I will keep updates coming as I go through the test. With this approach, schools could literally use computers until they completely failed while still allowing the students and staff to use the latest and greatest SW. There is a huge cost savings aside from the initial HW purchase in that the thin client SW only sends outputs from different devices and then recombines them onto the client. Thus, you do not have to have a M$FT client access license and you can "share" applications in the sense that 2,000 users could use only 500 licenses for M$FT Office. Pretty cool stuff.
More updates to come.
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