Thin-client computing makes headway against PC hard drives

Storage Networking World - When William Hill became director of IT at the city of Dayton, Ohio, in 1988, one of the first major projects he tackled was to rein in the total cost of ownership of desktop clients. At the time, some 2,200 of the city's 3,000 employees were using a mixed bag of desktop hardware, operating systems and applications.

"We had no less than 10 different word processing programs and untold numbers of database management systems," Hill says. Corporate data resided on six aging mainframes, which could only be accessed by 80 dumb terminals via an old 9.6K bit/sec. network, he adds. Administering software updates and patches was a nightmare. Furthermore, valuable data residing on PC hard drives was inaccessible to other end users and unmanageable by IT administrators.

After exploring various alternatives, Hill settled on a city-wide migration to a thin-client architecture. This was not a casual decision. It meant stripping end users' desktops of all local computing power and hard drives, and moving about 100 applications and huge amounts of data onto a central corporate network.

$700,000 in annual savings

Today, the City of Dayton uses a combination of Winterm 1200LE thin clients from Wyse, as well as Wyse Winterm 9450XE and 9455XL thin clients. The thin clients act as terminals, running applications and calling up data on multiuser Windows servers running Microsoft's Windows Terminal Server and Citrix's Metaframe (now Presentation Server). Thin clients in 123 buildings across the city are linked to the servers via a city-wide fiber optic network. End-user files have been removed from local hard drives and consolidated onto EMC NAS- and SAN-connected storage devices.

The advantages of the thin-client architecture have more than made up for the upfront pain and effort, Hill reports. The city saves about $700,000 a year, primarily from lower client maintenance costs, along with reduced data and software administration expenses.

"When I started here, we had 75 IT employees; today we have 36," says Hill. "We couldn't possibly have done that if we had all PCs. It's easier to maintain and control because we're not saving data on disparate PCs but on a central location."

His staff regularly backs up data from EMC's 4700 Clariion SAN to tape libraries from StorageTek. Furthermore, he notes, "Because users share applications and files, we're not so likely to have 150 different versions of the same document sitting on 150 different PC hard drives all over the city."

Now, end users can access and share data that used to be tucked away on someone's hard