When the phone rang one cold morning last February, a staffer at Saskatchewan service provider Today’s Technology Marketing Group (TTMG) was bemused to hear one of its clients, A.G.I. EnviroTank, asking when their last backup had been done.
A.G.I.’s facility was on fire.
TTMG, which hosts
most of the Biggar, Sask., company’s applications at its Saskatoon data center, and remotely backs up the onsite CAD stations, reassured the caller that only fifteen minutes of work would be lost.
According to TTMG’s general manager, Richard Davies, when the customers heard that “”they grabbed the wiener forks.””
Well, not really. But they had lots of time for toasting marshmallows — the fire truck took an hour and a half to arrive because it wouldn’t start.
Yet even as the building burned, A.G.I.’s staff was hard at work. “”For those users who lived in Biggar, they went home and logged into the Citrix server via Citrix Secure Gateway and MSAM,”” said Davies. “”I know they were probably notifying customers before the fire truck arrived. They certainly had enough time.””
Such is the power of thin clients, which lets servers push applications to users with no local storage.
That’s why the folks at A.G.I. could roll with the punches that unhappy day — all they lost was their window to their applications and data, not the applications and data themselves. “”Users stayed home the next day, Tuesday, and did their work from home,”” Davies said. “”We wired a temporary ATCO trailer on the Tuesday and they have been working from there while they rebuild.””
A.G.I. moved to thin clients for a very pragmatic reason. The company builds above-ground steel tanks, and no matter how hard it tried, it couldn’t keep manufacturing dust out of the electronic equipment, including PCs. Once high-speed communications lines became available, its computer reseller, TTMG, suggested that it also host and manage the computing infrastructure.
London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) in London, Ont., faced a different challenge. With over 150 applications and 1,700 desktops, keeping systems up to date was time-consuming and expensive. Add to that the terrifying cost of replacing rapidly aging hardware, and LHSC was ripe for change.
“”Some of the new Web and Windows-based applications we had to roll out required a lot of processing power and memory,”” said Peter Gilbert, co-ordinator of technology solutions at LHSC. “”We needed a scalable and cost-effective solution that would allow us to deploy the latest applications and upgrades to all of our staff.””
Faced with these issues, the hospital went looking for some budget-friendly help. Toronto-based Charon Systems recommended a thin client solution that allowed LHSC to use its existing PCs, of all vintages, while moving the processing burden to a server farm.
Now, Gilbert said, “”we can upgrade the application (Cerner, a specialized patient care system) on the servers within two hours, which is a huge contrast to the months our team spent deploying the software across all the desktops. As a result, we have completely eliminated the $10,000 in overtime costs on each application upgrade.””
Hardware costs reduced
On the hardware side, life is beautiful as well, he added. “”Previously, we had to replace hundreds of PCs annually, which resulted in significant IT expenditures. Since we installed the Citrix solution, we have been able to leverage our existing devices, and reduce our annual hardware costs substantially.””
However, Gilbert’s upgrading problems seem insignificant beside those of Mike Sjare, regional operation manager for Sun Country Health Region in Weyburn, Sask. His infrastructure spans 32 facilities spread over 200 square kilometers across the southeast corner of the province, and provides services to 1,200 individuals.
He supports it with three IT staff, and an eight-system Citrix server farm, plus 20 or so application and data servers.
“”We started using Citrix five and a half years ago, for a specific need,”” he noted. “”We had to deploy a common desktop. We found very quickly that it could solve unique problems in the growth of the corporation.””
One server grew to two the next year, and last year, he replaced those two with four new machines. The bulk of the thin client migration was made during the past six months. Four months ago, he had to top up the farm with another four servers.
Improved security
The security of the environment also required banning Web access, an unpopular decision but Sjare held his ground. He noted, “”Health information is a sacred thing now.””
“”For us as a department, Citrix has solved most of our problems,”” he said. “”We spend less time upgrading software on the corporate network. We spend less time servicing equipment. We spend less time on user orientation. IS has seen nothing but positives.””
With success stories like these, you’d think thin clients are taking over the market. Not so: Growth is slow.
According to IDC, the enterprise thin client hardware market will grow from 1.5 million units worldwide last year to 3.4 million in 2007. On the software side, Forrester Research predicts that revenue from server-based computing (SBC) products (primarily from Microsoft and Citrix) will increase about 14 per cent this year, to $1.6 billion, and will slowly increase to more than $2 billion by 2007.
In a recent report, Forrester analyst David Friedlander noted that the core SBC market has reached maturity. “”Most of the (future) growth will occur within existing deployments or in the small business market, which will primarily deploy Microsoft Terminal Server as a standalone product.””
TTMG’s Davies believes the low adoption rate for the technology is a reseller problem. “”It seems that resellers don’t understand the technology, or overcomplicate it,”” he said. “”It’s a general problem with the industry — we make things too complicated. I think a lot more companies would adopt (thin clients) if resellers understood them.””
Given that Forrester expects new customers to account for only 30 to 40 per cent of market revenues, he may have a point.
Resellers remembering and retreating from the old thin client model will have a pleasant surprise. The technology has grown up.
Citrix has a suite of products that work together to manage access to enterprise-scale computing resources. Its MetaFrame Access Suite is comprised Presentation Server, Secure Access Manager, Conferencing Manager, and Password Manager. Presentation Server runs the show, allowing remote access to applications running on Windows 2000 or 2003 Server via a LAN, WAN, or dial-up connection. The client can run on almost any OS, including Windows (even Windows CE and Pocket PC), DOS, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix, on PCs or dedicated thin clients. There’s also a version that runs within a Web browser via ActiveX or Java.
Microsoft growth
With Windows Server 2003, Microsoft has upgraded its Terminal Server to provide enterprise-friendly features such as load balancing, new application compatibility settings and management via group policies. Forrester notes that the SMB market is a huge growth market for Microsoft Terminal Server. Its share of the installed base should expand from 19 per cent in 2003 to 27 per cent in 2005.
Embedded Linux is also becoming a popular OS for thin clients. Wyse Technology, a long-time manufacturer of thin client hardware, recently introduced a unit based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, and Hewlett-Packard has also jumped in with its Compaq t5515 thin client.
Charon Systems president David Fung thinks that in advocating thin clients VARs have to analyze the problem the customer is trying to solve. “”I would say people don’t buy technology because it’s cool. They run it because
