PC Extender, The Future of Thin Clients?

Recently, Wyse made a splash with Project Borg. The product has since been released and is now called PC Extender. The premise of this product is that any existing PC can be transformed into a thin client without changing the hardware and theoretically without touching the device itself. PC Extender is an Microsoft Windows Installer program which requires 1 GB of free space on the hard drive of the user. What it proceeds to do when run is to take back that 1GB of free space and create a bootable partition on which the Wyse Enhanced Suse Linux Enterprise for Thin Clients is installed. In addition, a boot manager is installed which is set to automatically point to the newly created Wyse partition to boot the device. When the device is rebooted, it reboots as a Wyse thin client. This thin client can be managed exactly as if it were a Wyse thin client using the same management tools. Additionally, all of the Wyse thin client extension (TCX) components which are available under Linux can be used on this device including Wyse Multi-monitor, Multimedia, USB Virtualization, Rich Sound and Flash support. Also, the Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator can be used to increase the usability of the protocol in high latency or error prone networks.
The real value of this product can really only be realized when one looks at the use case scenarios in which the product really plays (please see my other posting for why a thin client is almost always better than a re-purposed PC for the enterprise):

• Providing a bridge for users with an existing PC environment which is still being amortized to gain the value of a thin computing environment without the capital expense of thin clients
  
  Not everyone is immediately ready to throw out their PCs. In fact, many still have either a lease or an amortization investment for these devices. This investment is often a deterrent for even thinking about virtualization because of the cost of maintaining both environments. Thus, a major transformation is put off until a large chunk of devices are ready to come off the books. PC Extender allows for the investment to be made with only a minor investment of the physical client side. Additionally, it provides a fallback scenario as it does not erase the existing hard drive, but rather creates a new partition and leaves the existing installation in place. Thus in the case of a major network catastrophe where the users cannot reach the backend environment, the users could work with non-network applications on the other partition by just re-booting the device.
• Adding other groups to an existing pilot/proof of concept projects without having to upset the apple cart
  
  Often, Pilots and Proofs of Concept are localized to a single group with a singular set of requirements. As the breadth of the scope is increased, other users must mak the same investment in order to prove their own concept. PC Extender provides a mechanism for these users to be included in the proof of concept without having to make the capital investment in thin clients. This inclusion allows for a more robust environment which encompasses the needs of the entire enterprise versus the requirements of a single group within the enterprise.
• Supporting a bring your own computer (BYOC) initiative in an enterpriseA concept which is gaining more and more momentum in the industry is the BYOC concept for user devices. The problem for an IT manager is how to support all of these environments because they do not have the resources to have each type of hardware which is being used. If instead, the device is converted into a thin client for work purposes and converted back into a personal device after work, the user has the best of all worlds and the IT manager does not have the headaches. While PC Extender's install program is only set up for a windows environment, the concept is easy to implement in a MAC environment. MAC environments allow for a dual boot scenario to be created and if a 1GB partition is made available, the Wyse Enhanced SLETC can be installed into that partition thus allowing the device to be a dual purpose device without the headaches of a dual purpose device.
• Providing a secure mechanism for work at home users to attach to the environment
  
  Much the same as the BYOC scenario, the work at home scenario allows a personal device from the uer to be re-purposed to be used as an enterprise device. Many call centers are moving toward a work at home scenario for their employees and PC Extender provides the perfect vehicle for leveraging the user's computing equipment for enterprise purposes while still allowing the user to return the device to home usage when not connected to the enterprise environment.

 Now, I am sure many of you are asking why the remote protocol client (ICA, RDP, PCoverIP) would not be used in the existing PC environment since that would require the least invasive approach for the user. The answer to that lies in three key areas:

1. Manageability
   For the first two scenarios, both the PC environment and the virtual environment must be managed with everything that a Windows environment requires for at least patch management, but also application management. Plus, this risk exists that the virtual environment will not be used completely because the user has access to all of the local applications.
   For the second two scenarios, the IT manager has no way of knowing what device will have to be configured to be allowed access to the enterprise environment. Plus, the IT manager must ensure that the correct remote protocol client is available for all possible environments.
   With PC Extender, the manageability of the device becomes the same as the manageability of a thin client, which is to say a simple, centralized configuration environment. All clients are managed in the exact same way with the exact same firmware, meaning that the job of the IT manager is how to distribute the PC Extender code.
2. Security
   The problem with any PC environment is that it can be compromised just by the user using the environment. A PC is set up to cache information and maintain that information across multiple boots. A thin computing environment is just the opposite. The thin computing environment was created to connect to a backend environment. Thus the only information which need be cached is that which is required to make the connection to the backend. And this information is so minute that it can be retrieved on te boot of the thin client. Thus, the thin client caches very little locally and in fact anything that is downloaded is purged upon reboot.
3. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
   In a typical distributed computing environment, each and every user would have to have multiple stations on which they could login in order to connect to the remote environment. While this is possible in a typical distributed computing environment, each one of the users would have to log into the host environment in order to get their access because of security requirements. By transforming the devices into thin devices, any user can walk up to any device and attach to the remote computing environment.
4. Productivity
   By having a controlled environment for connecting to the virtual environment, the IT manager can virtually assure that the availability of the computing environment is equivalent to the network availability which is typically 99.9999%. Additionally, the virtual machines of the users can be left in an "ON" state so that when the user attaches to their computer, a login sequence is not always required. The user may attach and detach from their running environment regardless of where the user is sitting at the moment.

PCs vs. Blade PCs/Workstations vs. Thin Computing

I have been working in the computing industry for many years now (more than I care to admit). I worked on the revolution from mainframe computing to personal computing. I worked on the revolution from personal computing to web computing. I believe that I am now working on the next revolution in computing, namely thin computing. Many people were surprised by my move from heading up all of infrastructure and security architecture at Deutsche Bank to heading up innovation at Wyse Technology. My answer to my critics is that I felt that the next revolution in computing needs to take place and take place now.

If we look at all of the computing power available worldwide, the number is staggering. There are approximately 1 billion computers in use in both business and home settings (some serving a dual purpose). If we were to make an examination of a single company's end user computing infrastructure, we would find a top utilization of 25% of the CPU. Of that 25% utilization, 90% of the utilization comes from about 10% of the user community. That means that we are leaving huge amounts of processing power to waste away. When you further analyze the fact that that computing power is being exchanged or updated at a rate of once every 3.5 years due to hardware issues and once every 2 years due to technological need, the surprise turns to rage. And when you further factor that on average each of those device is using 200 Watts of power or more (without the monitor), that rage turns to depression.
I did an analysis for a bank which showed that just by exchanging their aging PCs for medium sized (not the super small) thin clients, that they could save $250 per person per year. But I digress to topics for other posts.
There are some simple facts which no person or company can escape today:

• It is difficult at best to keep the latest and greatest operating system and software on the end user device
• A majority of support calls begin as follows:
  I have a problem with my XYZ
  What did you do?
  Nothing different than I normally do
  
  These calls usually lead to multiple levels of support becoming involved to debug a problem which probably was caused by a software update which occured in the background (either intentional or malicious)
• If the problem cannot be solved on the telephone, either a service call is made (read very expensive) or the end user lives with the state of the device
• The cost of adding new end user devices or moving or updating existing end user devices is extremely expensive because users are tied to there device in that they store information relevant to what they are doing on the device
• Computers are by their nature targets for theft and as such, the information that is stored on the device is a target for theft
• As stated above, the environmental cost (this also includes the fact that a computer should be kept in a climate controlled, clean environment which again costs money) of computing is horrendous considering how much of the device's potential we use

Business face some added costs which they cannot avoid:

• Supplemental hardware costs (local information servers, local print servers)
• Networking costs (bandwidth is required to move information to and from users, i.e. when an e-mail with a 1 MB attachment [small these days] is sent to 50 people, 50 copies of the attachment are pushed to 50 devices in the network)
• Insurance costs (because of the targeted nature of computing devices for theft, companies must insure themselves against that threat)
• Security costs (while this could be perceived as a cost for everyone, the end user usually scrapes by with whatever was sent with the device, but a company cannot)
• Productivity loss (everytime that an end user for a company must take the time to debug an issue on his/her device, that is time which they could have used to do their job)
• Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity (companies must insure themselves against the natural and unnatural threats to their computing infrastructure and ensure that the business can continue)

Citrix and Wyse Technology original paired together when creating the first viable thin computing architecture based on Microsoft Windows Terminal Services. The concept behind this architecture is to share out applications to a user in a session. That is to say that a user needs Microsoft Office, Eudora E-mail and Adobe Acrobat, so the applications are packaged on a special Citrix server and served out as published applications to the end users. Many users can leverage the same server to get there applications (much like a web server). The end users can then leverage thin clients as their end user device, thereby eliminating many of the costs and problems above. There are issues with this architecture which I will address in future posts.

As momentum grew for this solution (Citrix is now a 1 billion dollar company because of this architecture), more and more companies came out with competing architectures. ClearCube introduced a blade PC solution for moving the computing power into the telephony closet (and in some cases back into the data center). HP introduced their CCI architecture. Both of these concepts (and some other lesser known concepts including the IBM HC10) are based on maintaing the current relationship between a single user and a compute device, but reducing the size of the device at the end user. This is equivalent to putting a network KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) switch in place for the user. The problem with this architecture is that it maintains many of the issues of the standard PC model while introducing the network display protocol as a new issue.

Finally, a number of different products have been introduced for virtualizing an 80x86 hardware platform. Most notably among them is VMWare. VMWare just this year announced that they would support PCs running as virtual machines in their ESX server infrastructure. This news was well taken because VMWare requires virtually no change to the running PC infrastructure in order to run the in the virtual machine infrastructure. Again, low cost thin clients can be used to connect to this infrastructure. However, this infrastructure also introduces its own new set of issues (again to be discussed in a later post).

If every architecture has its own set of issues, why then do I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution. The answer is simple: money. While people will usually pay more for the comfort of something that they know, when they are confronted with the savings potential of moving away from their current computing model, I am of the opinion that they will run to a new computing model much the same as when PCs revolutionized the computing industry.

In future posts, I will cover the different thin computing models (including some exciting new models which may just push this technology trend into the technology mainstream).