Thin Clients

The least efficient form of personal computing is the thick client. We should require justification for having:

• CPU idling
• hard drives idling
• gigabytes of RAM just ticking over on the clock
• CD/DVD drives used rarely
• a huge case and power supply collecting dust
• case fans collecting dust, wearing and making noise

Thin clients should be our default clients with a minority of clients thick. Even power users should only need a larger slice of the server or a cluster of servers. Few ordinary users of PCs need a thick client unless they do video editing or similar crunching on huge data-sets constantly. Where I work, there is no one in the whole organization who needs a thick client. Besides saving energy, material, maintenance, we get a more spacious and quieter workplace without them.

The power savings per client is 30 to 125 watts for various clients that I have seen. This may not justify the change on this basis alone but for new installation/replacements it looks good because you will have costs anyway and the thin client costs less to buy. My costs on the server are less than 10 watts of power and $25 capital cost. Even where there is no more room or power in the server room, a server can be added to the work-place instead if there are normally many clients in place. One server takes less power and makes less noise than ten thin clients while it might replace 50 or 100 clients. *NIX OS on the clients and servers conserves a lot of RAM so fewer servers are needed to do the job and lower-cost thin clients work quite well.

People spend a lot of time discussing energy savings and maintenance reductions by consolidating servers but there are many more clients than servers so moving to thin clients saves much more energy.