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).