Is thin in? Will the 'new' thin client contain spiraling campus computing and support costs, or is it just the 21st century's dumb terminal?

University Business,  June, 2004  by Matt Villano

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It's no secret that fat has become the new American way. On our highways, SUV roadhogs and oversized pickups outnumber compact and economy cars by a ratio of nearly two to one. In our restaurants, the average portion is supersized--almost twice the size of average portions in other advanced nations around the world. Even in our personal. lives, fat is taking over: A recent study by the federal. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that Americans are sitting around and eating themselves to death, with obesity closing in on tobacco as the nation's top underlying preventable killer. Surrounded by all of this fatness, it may be surprising that a handful, of colleges and universities are revolutionizing their approaches to campus computing by getting thin. By getting thin clients, that is.

Instead of supplying students and staff members with traditional, public desktop terminals that require maintenance and manual upgrades, these schools have opted for kiosk-type units that boast little more than a network card, a processor, a video card, and some local memory. Thin clients are built with singlechip designs that reduce power consumption, maximize Internet compatibility, and present a simplified, controlled environment for effortless software integration. The educators who are using the technology de scribe it as cheap, easy to manage, and easy to secure.

"Thin client computing brings new meaning to the phrase less is more," quips Christine Williams, director of engineering at Michigan Technical University. "When I say 'more" I mean more ROI, more secure networks, and more time on my hands to do other things."

Thin Clients 101

As Williams implies, the concept behind thin client computing is, at its core, reductionism on a large scale (see "Thin Clients: A History," page 25). While traditional, fat-client PCs operate as independent, individual nodes on a larger network, thin clients act as identical parts of a larger whole, doing no processing of their own. Instead, applications run on a shared server or group of servers and are then, upon request, distributed over the network to terminals. With the right kind of software--software designed to manage multiple application sessions at a time-network managers can set up a thin client system to administer itself. When these technologists make a change at the server level, the change is immediately reflected in every thin client across the network.

Sound simple? Some technologists are insisting it is. According to Dana Gardner, senior analyst in the enterprise software division Boston-based Yankee Group, the beauty of the thin client approach to computing ties in its simplicity. Gardner hails the technology as "sensible," noting that anything that eases the day-to-day burden for network administrators and technical support representatives is a "gift." He adds that thin clients work well for colleges and universities because these organizations rarely need to deliver maximum services to all of their constituents.

"One of the niches where [thin clients] are becoming interesting is where you have constituents who don't necessarily need to stare at a computer terminal all day long," he says. "If you can centrally control the applications available to those users, and you can centrally guarantee the security of your network, why would you approach computing any other way?"

But there are those who hold another perspective regarding thin. Some point to the danger of a server going down and disabling all thin clients in the system. Others note the limited memory and RAM associated with thin client systems, and the vulnerability to single virus outbreaks. And according to inside sources at Big Blue, IBM dropped the thin client approach two years ago, and evidently one of the reasons for the move was what IBM saw as the client's inflexibility in an increasingly mobile world. With thin clients, said IBM spokespeople, mobile solutions are a problem since users are tied to the LAN. For campuses--where mobile and wireless technology has taken off--that can mean restricted use of notebook computers in the classroom and lecture hall, no connectivity to wireless computing in the quad, and no plug-and-play at Starbucks or the student center.

Yet despite the cons espoused by Big Blue and others, thin client hardware can now be purchased from a variety of OEMs. Equipment providers such as Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), Neoware (www.neoware.com), and Wise Solutions (www.wise.com) have all established traction in the higher education market.

Key to every thin client operation, however, is the software itself: the engine that keeps the system running. Vendors such as Citrix (yvww.citrix.com), Tarantella (www.tarantella.com) and Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) serve the education marketplace with such software products, and British vendors such as Getech (www.getech.co.uk) and DAT Group (www.datgroup.com) have been pushing products for U.S. higher education environments, as well.