John McGinnis wrote:
It depends on your situation. If a company is retiring WinPC's in a 3 year
cycle AND they have rock solid security infrastructure AND they can police
policy on both aspects and their users almost like Christian monks of old,
then you might get away with a lower TCO that way. But quite honestly most
folks don't have that kind of discipline at the business level.
Acquisition costs are only about a 1/3 of the total TCO model for a
standalone PC environment. The balance is maintenance and software
management. And most of that cost is labor. So let me give you an example
that HP is pitching. They have something called a PC cluster. A large blade
server running Win Term Svr in a cluster. When a user logs in they use a CE
display device to use a dedicated blade. Their roaming profile is loaded on
the blade and presented to the terminal. Now the imputed HW cost per blade
is ~$1200 per seat. HP claims that the savings in management/labor discounts
the cost over that of a $500 standalone PC in a dense user environment in
less than 2 years.
Well here is the funny thing. Does this not sound an awfully lot like LTSP?
In fact it is right down to where the apps run, on the blade. So I conclude
that if HP can do the TCO for a device 3x more expensive than standalone Win
to Win then I can only make a positive assessment that a well designed LTSP
installation will do even better.
LTSP is not for everyone. As a gaming machine LTSP should not even be tried.
But for small business a really decent workstation with 2-4Gb of memory,
appropriate disk capacity and a 100mb network as a server can easily handle
5 terminals with all their aps that need to be used for the business. The
nice thing about server centric computing is that you don't need roaring
speed at the display device. Old PII's work just fine.
And I find great encouragement in the fact that HP thinks this is viable,
I'm quite sure that they crunch figures a lot better than I do. My concern
was caused by looking at the new thin client boxes I've found on the web
and realizing that low end Dells are initially cheaper. I've found
that TCO
is a hard point to make with most people, they usually look at up front
costs
and ignore the details, so I was looking for a good argument against
"the low road",
and I think I've heard one. Maybe I'm just hanging with a bad crowd. ;-)
J. Toman
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