Slimming TCO With Thin Clients

ENT, March 4, 1998 by David B. Miller

Breaking the Backbone?

If your technologically savvy and progressive network manager is looking for an excuse to get that 100-Mbps switched Ethernet network to the desktop, he or she won't find it with thin clients. Thin client vendors categorically deny that networks will crumble under the weight of tremendous network traffic. In fact, most vendors offer all the good taste of a traditional PC environment without the network fat.

"In reality, thin clients generate very little network traffic," states Neoware's Kantrowitz. "Our customers are able to connect hundreds of thin clients to existing Ethernet networks without making any changes. It's just not true that thin clients require significant changes to existing networks or servers."

Neoware's white paper "Network Computers, NetPCs and network Traffic" contain the results of a comparative test conducted between a Neoware NC accessing a Windows NT Server running NTrigue 3.0 multiuser Windows NT code from Insignia Solutions Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), using the ICA-3 protocol, and an unnamed diskless NetPC. All tests were conducted on a shared 10-Mbps Ethernet network.

Typical office applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Power-Point, as well as Quark, were run using both machines. Various documents were opened and typical operations were performed on the documents from each client type. The test was conducted for 1 hour.

Neoware's results cite that the NC generated 1.5 MB of network traffic in the hour-long test as opposed to the 20 MB of network traffic generated by the NetPC. Taking it one step further, Neoware calculated that, given the efficiency of shared Ethernet, a customer could connect 900 NCs to their network, as opposed to 66 NetPCs.

Tektronix takes a different angle on the network performance issue in its white paper "Network Loading Characteristics of ICA-3 and X11." Tektronix used the popular Win Tach and WinBench performance benchmarks from Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) and Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. (New York), respectively. Tektronix claims that, for typical office applications, its WinDD product was "six to nine times as efficient as any X11-based product." So, a good question to ask is this: "If the X Window System protocol has been successfully run on Ethernet networks for this long, how can you argue with the more efficient ICA-3?"

Jim Fulton, vice president, strategy, at Network Computing Devices Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), concurs: "Most thin clients are designed specifically for use in shared LANs using typical 10-Mbps Ethernet. Many are even used over wide-area networks and even dial-up lines. Thin clients offload chunky file-transfer traffic from the network and replace it with much smoother and more predictable graphics command streams that are kinder and gentler on routers and other infrastructure."

Killer Apps?

OK, what about the applications we run, something about which we might feel rather powerless to do anything? One of the biggest advantages of a multiuser NT variant such as Microsoft's Windows Terminal Server or Citrix's WinFrame is its ability to let us use the same off-the-shelf applications that we typically run around and install on everyone's PC. Still, there any general rules of thumb to consider.