Killing the Business Desktop PC Softly
by Johan De Gelas on July 19, 2007 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
In many scenarios is the Blade PC a rather complex way of solving the TCO problem of the traditional desktop PC. It seems to be a case of throwing out the child with the bath water. There is a lot that can be done to lower the TCO of the PC:
Right now, VDI is not really a competitor, as you can only run a limited number of desktops on one server if you want the same guaranteed performance and RAM space as with blade PCs. As a result the licensing cost of the virtualization software per desktop quickly increases. That is why current implementations of VDI mostly target light loads that are not compatible with SBC. When you run 20 or more desktops from one server, the (e.g. VMWare ESX/infrastructure) licensing costs start to become significant.
CCI and blade PCs do have a window opportunity. As long as VDI licensing cost are relatively high and as long as most business PCs are not (fully) optimized for TCO, blade PCs make a lot of sense in an enterprise with many small remote offices. In that case, if something goes wrong with something like a software deployment, it is good to be able to administer it locally, keeping the infrastructure close to where the system administrators are located.
The business PC is not going away (at least not yet), but as virtualization gets more mature and flexible (and as graphics cards get virtualized too), and as competition heats up, the most promising technology is still VDI. VDI might even prove to be an alternative to blade PCs. For now, SBC and Terminal Services are the only alternatives to desktop PCs that have a proven track record of lowering TCO. At least that is our analysis; what do you think? Let us know!
We'd like to thank Koen Slechten, De Witte Pierre (HP Belgium) and Carine Goris (IBM Belgium) for their help.
In many scenarios is the Blade PC a rather complex way of solving the TCO problem of the traditional desktop PC. It seems to be a case of throwing out the child with the bath water. There is a lot that can be done to lower the TCO of the PC:
- Use energy efficient components; PCs that use one or more mobile components are already available
- Avoid using moving parts, such as CPU fans or hard disks; this will soon be possible, as Solid State devices get cheaper and low voltage CPUs are available
- Make the PC a stateless device by using roaming profiles
- Use (semi) automated management of images (Altiris or similar)
- Store all data and profile information on network storage
- Downtime is minimized: you can swap one PC for another one
- Good 3D graphics performance does not require high amount of continuous bandwidth
- As you have only one computer instead of two (thin client + blade PC), energy bills will be lower
- TCA is much lower
- Most of the administration and management costs are reduced, making the difference with a blade PC very small
Right now, VDI is not really a competitor, as you can only run a limited number of desktops on one server if you want the same guaranteed performance and RAM space as with blade PCs. As a result the licensing cost of the virtualization software per desktop quickly increases. That is why current implementations of VDI mostly target light loads that are not compatible with SBC. When you run 20 or more desktops from one server, the (e.g. VMWare ESX/infrastructure) licensing costs start to become significant.
CCI and blade PCs do have a window opportunity. As long as VDI licensing cost are relatively high and as long as most business PCs are not (fully) optimized for TCO, blade PCs make a lot of sense in an enterprise with many small remote offices. In that case, if something goes wrong with something like a software deployment, it is good to be able to administer it locally, keeping the infrastructure close to where the system administrators are located.
The business PC is not going away (at least not yet), but as virtualization gets more mature and flexible (and as graphics cards get virtualized too), and as competition heats up, the most promising technology is still VDI. VDI might even prove to be an alternative to blade PCs. For now, SBC and Terminal Services are the only alternatives to desktop PCs that have a proven track record of lowering TCO. At least that is our analysis; what do you think? Let us know!
We'd like to thank Koen Slechten, De Witte Pierre (HP Belgium) and Carine Goris (IBM Belgium) for their help.
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smokenjoe - Wednesday, July 25, 2007 - link
I just thought I would post some end user experience as these are not all that common. We had an intel based thin client. When they were fist implemented last year they were OK slower than the dated computers they replaced but usable. Unfortunatly as time went oth they started having more and more issues to the point that it was common to have only one working thin client out of 6. We had to boot the clerks off their old PIII computers from the dark ages because they were the only ones that worked. People literally jumped for joy when we got the PC's back.Without being part of the IT department it is hard to say where the fault was but at the bare minimum make sure you have people that have the training and security privileges to fix problems any time they are needed. I had multiple reports of "I cant fix that I dont have the security privileges we will have someone fix it on Monday."
Thank god they did not think the clerks important enough to upgrade or we would have been lost.
yanman - Monday, July 23, 2007 - link
Another alternative which is available through a mix of technologies is removing only the local storage of your corporate desktop fleet and replacing this with a PXE-boot solution. There are vendors that can allow iSCSI boot of XP installs via a proprietary solution using PXE.i.e. Dell Optiplex with onboard GbE, boots from PXE, loads iSCSI stack, mounts guest LUN on the SAN for it's XP image, boots. Possibly you could leave the local hard disk in and use it only for swap space.
Advantages
- Less forced change on the users
- Better workstation performance
- Retains the thin-client advantages of ensuring all data is on the SAN
Disadvantages
- Can significantly increase SAN and network utilisation
- Slightly exotic setup that may not be fully supported by the hardware vendor.
Ajax9000 - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
Could you please spell out VDI on page 9. I knew pretty much what was being talked about, but I still had to Google to be sure.The workstation blades are an interesting development. Would it be possible to do VDI over workstation blades?
I ask because where I work (a government department) went Citrix in about 2001. At that time performance was reasonable in Head Office, but flaky in the handful of regional offices. We had thin clients, skinny clients (PCs stripped down to act as thin clients -- to save on TCA of course), and fat clients for specialised uses. It worked quite well -- I'd run 20MB+ spreadsheets under Citrix and use a fat client for publishing & graphics apps that wouldn't run under Citrix.
The only problem was making sure IT didn't downgrade you from fat client. :-)
But the government then amalgamated us with some other agencies (with standard PC setups) and we went from ~800 staff to over 2500 staff with many regional offices with poor network connections. And there was much more specialised uses such as greatly expanded GIS/mapping, web mapping, publishing, etc. Trying to get a sensible IT setup took three years ... and then there was another round of amalgamations with another round of IT integration issues that still haven't been resolved (and again involving lots more GIS/mapping, web mapping, etc).
So, would it be possible to do VDI over workstation blades as a way of distributing ARCinfo "floating" licences, Adobe apps, etc, across multiple sites rather than having dedicated workstations in "fixed" sites?
RandyDGroves - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
This was a nice detailed review of CCI, but completely missed the fact that IBM is using PC-over-IP technology from Teradici (www.teradici.com) instead of a Thin Client. Unlike software solutions such as ICA, RDP, and RGS; Teradici's PC-over-IP processors use hardware to bridge the video, audio, and USB traffic between the desktop device (called a Portal) and the blade workstation. This enables a perception-free experience in which the end user cannot detect that their PC has been remoted. Furthermore, since the Portal only has a hardware decoder chip, it is lower power than a Thin Client.For full disclosure, I am the CTO for Teradici and obviously biased. But, here are some links to recent articles in other publications that may be of interest:
Wall Street Journal - http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1722520524296.ht...">http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1722520524296.ht...
EETimes - http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht...">http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht...
The Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/06/teradici_b...">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/06/teradici_b...
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
The briefing we got in IBM's blade HQ in Raleigh about the IBM HC10 was a lot more about the concept. The actual hardware and software was not discussed in detail. That is why I focused mostly on CCI, as I had been shown the exact specifications.florrv - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
As a network security manager for an F100, we've found a very useful niche for VDI technology: 3rd party developers.Rather than have a 3rd party connect directly into your dev environment, you set up a VDI environment and give them a controlled sandbox. This way, you can lock down what data goes back and forth to the 3rd party.
senseamp - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
As mentioned, this has been out for 8 years as SunRays.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
You can take your badge out, go to any place in the company with a Sunray (like drop in office), put your badge in, and it will pop up the desktop where you left off. Unix (such as Solaris) is designed from ground up for this kind of work (multiple users running on same OS with remote display), so it works very well, if the network is behaving well. With star/open office and firefox/thunderbird, that's good enough for most office work, and if you need a lot of performance, you can dispatch jobs to bigger machines or compute farms in the company.
szaijan - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
Sun has been pushing the thin client architecture for years, yet there's no mention in the article. Having worked on multiple Sunray clusters, and many PC netwroks, I have the say the thin client setup is much better for day-to-day office and e-mail work, simply based on the lack of overhead in installation, bug resolution, boot times, et. al. Cost is much lower overall. The downside is that network problems make work impossible, while you can still utilize a PC when the network is down or overloaded. A decent netwrok infrastructure makes this a minor issue.All that said, CAD, Photoshop, 3D Modeling, et. al., while not impossible, are badly hampered by the mouse latency, and the precision needed for such endeavors just isn't there. Of course you can just add a work station to the network for employees who require that level of client power.
Adul - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
We've been on a mission to getting rid of our thin clients as they been a source of pain since they keep getting infected with viruses, we can't patch them with normal updates, etc.JohanAnandtech - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
Very interesting. As you might have noticed, there are a lot "should" and "might" in the article :-). Could you tell me what kind of thin clients you are using? Running XP Embbedded? Why can't you patch them?