The Thinclient in the Initial days was with Geode Processor with 8MB Flash and 16 MB of Memory.. the OS was basically of Embedded Linux and and WINCE and Embedded NT was yet to come in..These were the very initial days and the teams in India were just trying to learn the basics.. there are hardly any references available there for any issues and every thing had to be invented..
Many of the Government / Banking / Private customers were just started computerization or up gradating their older Green Terminals.. At this stage the for Thinclients the only solution available was based computing and the connectivity has to be only on LAN..
The issues related to Hardware were really serious - The Server Hardware really need to be very high.. and at that point of time even a 1GB Memory on a server is a luxury... the cost of of server was really high..
The connectivity of peripherals devices to the Thinclients and make them work with out any issues was really challenging.. there were different printers and configurations available.. (Serial / parallael etc..) then the customers wanted to connect few devices for scanning and other purposes.. basically through Serial..
Every time we meet up with the customers the following were the key questions asked;
1. What are all the applications need to run
2. What are all the peripherals need to be attached
3. Networking available or not (We are talking about LAN)
4. Any expertise on Server available or Not
and then whats the over all cost considering the Thinclient + Monitor + Server.. (The monitors were 14" CRT Monitors..)
To address this we come out with the different solutions like;
- Port mapping
- Port re-direction (Parallel / Serial)
- Drive mapping / Management etc.
Operating system was another challange - The new Server was Operating system based on Windows was a total new concept in India (Windows NT) and the terminal services on NT was altogether a new concept..
customers are not used to pay license fee just for a service (Terminal Services) and Terminal services by default doesnt support all functionalities discussed on the above.. hence more challange.. The other option available (easy option i would say) is to go with Citrix but then the cost of license was much higher than that of the Thinclient Hardware itself..
so with all these Technical challenges the vendors have launched Thinclients in India (VXL and followed by HCL)..
Dear Durai
ReplyDeleteThere is still in depth knowledge to be covered for the exisistence of thinclient solution.
The initial computing was with Unix which command line interface , meaning the user needs to be well versed with command to operate the computer, this had given birth DOS operating system , but it did not address the expected user freindliness , As networking was not that popular during those DOS days , every individual PC needs to be loaded with application, which was a herculant task for IT managers, With these Novel came into the picture where it addressed the loading of application at a central novel server and have DOS based client to accesses these application.
Over a period of time we noticed the destktop based OS coming out from microsoft,and this was the time which kick started transistion of software and hardware at a faster rate , for eg we had seen Win 95 / Win 98 / Win ME / Win logon / Win XP / Win VISTA / Win7 and it goes on on the other side the hardare goes from 286 / 386 / 486 / P1/ P11 / P3 / P4 / Dual Core / C2D and So on and Soforth. But though we had seen differnt OS getting released from MS , there was still gap to look at IT manager problems that they faced day to day on maintaining the application in each deskptop besides Virus control. Where as the parallel OS Unix which was a central server computing model doesn not call for big hardware and OS at client side , and there was no virus issue. The clients in Unix were just X86 based dumb terminal. With these factors in mind MS came out with concept of server based windows computing which released Windows NT server
OS , and so called client server architecture .This still not addressed the computing benefit of Unix model , since all application are still reside locally in each client, which was a huge task for IT mangers to maintain the version control of application software,at the same time the hardware were getting obsolete at a faster rate , which is the proof of X86 to C2D PC of today's generation. on the other hand for a normal user on windows even today the computing power of 286 was more sufficient , due to technology changes we look replacement of desktops or rather forced to change the deskptop configuration.
To address these faster changes and the problems faced by IT Managers , MS came to similar computing model of Unix in Windows and that was known WIN NT Terminalserver , where in the application are maintained at the central server and the client can be as small as 286 , since the entire computing power now shifts to central server, and client just acts as input/output device , and these clients are now known in todays market as thinclients . This has now brought another era computing model called Virutal computing , where the total computing control goes to central location and the client can as small as your mobile phones and acceses application anytime anywhere.
RGDS
Krishnamurthy
HCL Infosystesm Ltd.
9840078113