Fat Client & Thin Server Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Fat Client & Thin Server

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To: RTev who wrote (6)	7/25/1999 11:35:00 AM
From: Stormweaver	of 20

Firstly, RTev, I'm charting new waters with this idea although I'm sure I'm not the first to dream it up. I do have answers to your questions though ... IT organizations noted some time ago that it's expensive to maintain all those fat clients that they've deployed onto desktops High TCO of the current desktop is in direct proportion to the richness of functionality offered to the user. The stupider the end unit the more FRU like it is and therefore easier to maintain. Problem is there is currently no commercial quality industry accepted thin client (FRU/JavaStation) simply because it doesn't provide the functionality that end users require. I contend that TCO can be significantly reduced through the thin-server model along with more intelligent OS utilities to detect install updated images/patches from remote disks; runs at boot and then periodically after that. The response from vendors to high TCO has been to add features to the server that attempt to rein it in through things like systems management software and directory services. From an IT perspective this is fixing the problem in reverse and bulking up the server side moving away from it's true purpose as a shared data repository. This is good for some segments of the tech industry since it means people need to buy more resources on the server end to perform these tasks. You mention that a db would probably reside on your thin client, but where would the processing be done? Servers now become ever bigger and faster so that they can handle the transactions needed to feed only the requested data to the client. Are you suggesting that they should become dumber and let each client download all the data needed to process a query or other transaction? Actually I said a DB or IO API would be available from the client side to interact with the remote disk services. Each remote disk would be managed by a minimal embedded system that would provide the DB, Directory and file service implementation; a cut-down NDIS or Oracle lite. Therefore processing of select's etc could happen at the remote disk side. No need for a bulky OS; stick to the basics of providing a mechanism to serve the data. The client would have the equivalent of a resource browser that would detect the type of remote disk and provide the appropriate interface to it. Oracle and Novell are best positioned to take advantage of this idea. I think at one point Oracle hinted that in the future Oracle may not require an OS to run on a box. /James

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