re: using old PC's as Hydra terminals
A rather blatent bit of plagerism from Microsoft. Pick up any Citrix marketing piece to see this story. Nothing new here.
The question on NC advantages is a bit tricky. First of all it depends on which variant of the NC definition you wish to use. If you're into Java, then forget old PC's - they're just too doggy slow. If you're into standalone web browsing, you might be okay, although you'll probably need memory upgrades for today's bloated browsers, and you may have performance/capability problems if you depend on too many esoteric plug-ins. If you're into a more server centric, network terminal model, (which I still prefer due to simplicity and effectiveness), you could stretch old PC's for a long time. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what I would recommend most people do. It gets them going in the better system architecture with the minimum investment.
This is just the old X terminal story all over. Long ago I used to have debates about workstations vs X terminals. The w/s folks always looked down on the thought of an X terminal. They said that we would fade away. I told them, no, the w/s will fade away. The built-in obsolescence makes it an inherently flawed design for the majority of installations. What happens to workstations is that they evolve into X terminals. Since they all ship with X capabilities, users found that more and more power was being added to network servers, and more and more of the applications they were running were not local, but rather ran somewhere else and merely displayed remotely.
There is actually very little 'wrong' with the idea of using a w/s for an X terminal, or an old PC as a Windows terminal, assuming you can avoid the dink factor, (this is when users insist on 'dinking' with the systems, causing no end of admin headaches). Of course you should try to cover up the fact that you wasted all that money in the first place when your CFO starts asking why you didn't buy the cheaper system in the first place, given that you were going to eventually implement exactly what we told you do do, albeit with more expensive hardware. To net this out, the advantage our solution has is that we build an integrated system *designed* to behave this way, not some device that has been pieced together at the customer site. You can solve the problem this way, but I can pretty much guarantee you that you will
a) waste time getting the configuration you want
b) mine will run better for less money
c) mine won't have near the stability problems or support
problems that the PC will have, (can you say conflicting
interrupts? :)
re: NCD fitting into the Microsoft picture
It's a perfect mesh. We sell WinCenter this way today just to get folks used to the model. Then when they either upgrade or add seats, we sell them dedicated systems instead of PC's. It's much simpler for everyone. They get to 'try it out', their users get used to the improved performance, and we get a reasonable business going forward. Having Microsoft softening customers up for our view of the world is the most unbelievably great thing to happen to NCD in years. We're delighted that Bill finally understands what we've been saying since 1988. |
