Thin Clients saving Sun money?
From Thick clients: Betting against the network?, an article from Computerworld: Sun CIO juggles tight budgets, IT integration. This comment particularly was interesting:
(Bill) Vass (of Sun) expects to spend about $300 million this year on Sun’s IT needs, a figure that represents about 2% of the company’s expected revenue this year. The average company spends between 3% and 4% of its revenue, most figures show — and most of Sun’s direct competitors spend far more.
For a long time I’ve been working on building a thin client solution for my business to make life easier for me. I’ve blogged previously about NX and SRSS, although at that time I can out in favour of NX, I’m still interested in SRSS. Some trouble with FreeNX and the !machine client, plus lack of good Amd64 support and a seeming slow down in FreeNX development maybe be consider my options again recently. Plus the whole Java Card Sun Ray seems very useful. One of the things holding me back for deciding either way at the moment is a good analysis of the bandwidth requirements.
The spec is complicated by our situation with two main offices and five staff in each office. My original plan was to run a v20z in the colo I’ve set up and centralise both offices to this server. One office has a 3Mbit wireless link, the other office a 1Mb/386Kb frame link. Its the second link I’m not sure can handle the bandwidth requirements which has slowed my planning up.
The main reason I’ve planned to use one core server at a colo is power security, secondly one server makes for easier maintenance. Given bandwidth issues, I might consider setting up a server at the slower office just for those desktops.
However numbers like the above make me realise I’m on the right track. They also provide me with a good benchmark to consider the cost of these options and how they compare to standard business practice.
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