The Information Technology (IT) Vocabulary Builder series aims to deliver a very concise summary of a currently relevant topic to Information Professionals.  It is done mostly by collecting a small number of highly relevant web links to save you the time of combing through search results yourself.  It differs from sites such as Wikipedia because it includes opinions, forecasts, and detractions in addition to just facts.

They say that If you want a new idea, read an old book.  That saying always sticks in my head after I see a presentation suggesting that an organization shift to using thin clients.  This same idea has had many names – mainframe computing, client/server deployment, and now thin clients.  It has come and go from information technology vogue many times and seems to me to show up every time that a major operating system vendor – Apple, LINUX, or Windows releases a new version that claims to support it better than before.

thin_client

Here is how Wikipedia introduces the topic:

"A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a client computer or client software in client-server architecture networks which depends primarily on the central server for processing activities, and mainly focuses on conveying input and output between the user and the remote server. In contrast, a thick or fat client does as much processing as possible and passes only data for communications and storage to the server.

 

The term was coined in 1993 by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corp., while working with company founder Larry Ellison on the launch of the landmark Oracle7 release of the company’s flagship relational database management system (RDBMS). Ellison had charged Negris with finding a way to boldly differentiate Oracle’s server-centric software from the decidedly desktop-oriented products of then-rival Microsoft. Thin Client became Ellison’s relentless battle cry, repeated in hundreds of speeches, interviews and articles attendant to the release of Oracle7 and many other products after that."

Among the advantages of this approach are lower capital outlay, simplified architectures, enhanced security, scalability, ease of troubleshooting, repair, and upgrade, and environmental footprint.  Disadvantages are requirement for expert administrators, specialized training, inability to customize workstations, lack of peripherals, expense of central nodes, reliance on single vendor supply chains, and vulnerability to system outage based upon server outage. 

My suggestion is only that they be used in cases where the computing requirements are both completely understood and defined as well as standardized.  I think that most groups find that while they may have been smart ideas when they were deployed, the majority of them are replaced by more standard PC architectures when it comes time to upgrade.  For most organizations, flexibility is a better long term advantage than lower capital outlay.

The following references provide excellent extended reading on the topic:

Does your team use this term regularly?  Do you have experience deploying, maintaing, or using thin clients? Do you think that it will last? Please share your thoughts on this emerging paradigm.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for October 1, 2009.

Image Credit: HP.com http://www.hp.com

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