Nice article on Xbox and how it relates to the thin client discussion.
I’m always surprised – not to say, a little saddened – by how hard companies find it to make the whole concept of “thin clients” work.
When you are whiteboarding your company strategy, the pitch which accompanies the thin client concept always sounds attractive. You can deal with 90-plus per cent of most people’s daily grind with a tiny fraction of the horsepower shipped in a netbook, never mind anything in a regular desktop case.
Microsoft clearly has this idea very much in mind because when Bill Laing demonstrated Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop VDI (which to you and me, is remote computing with a whole virtual machine to yourself, inside a super-quick server running off the network), he made significant use of a ThinLinx, a little emerald-coloured box that drew only three watts of power.
What seems to prevent companies from using these little wonders is one of four factors. The first, Microsoft feels is it is addressing in the new feature set of Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop. RemoteFX means you can put a high-powered graphics chipset in the server and it will do the hard parts of 3D rendering in a display-hungry application. That’s cool, though from hints at the end of the presentation, it sounds like only those with deep pockets and big problems will use it – only two guest VDI machines per server-side render-friendly graphics card, sounds like a hard sell for the rest of us.
The second problem is that almost nobody has a completely green field for this type of computing, and pretty much everyone can recycle old PCs as thin clients, more cheaply than they can buy new.
The third is thin clients keep on turning up with just that bit too much taken out – so the little emerald box had VGA analogue out and HDMI, but no DVI.
The fourth killer problem is that there’s some stuff that just won’t pass through a client/server Remote Desktop (formerly known as Terminal Services) session all that reliably.
Chief amongst that type of traffic is voice and video. Lots of demonstrations during TechEd show that Microsoft is pouring brainpower into those areas – the Silverlight streaming video player responding seamlessly to an artificial bandwidth choke in mid-play was especially impressive – but as ever, the real gems were to be found down on the show floor.
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