Calculating thin client costs
With Terminal Services included in Windows 2000 Server products, it's
natural to wonder about the efficiency and cost of implementing thin
clients for at least some of your enterprise's desktop users. This tip,
excerpted from Windows 2000/NT Thin Client Solutions, by Todd W. Mathers, published by New Riders, discusses some of the costs of the thin-client way of life.
Calculating the hard costs for a project is usually fairly
straightforward. You determine the hardware and software required and
then total their cost. The total amount of hard cost savings in a [thin
client] implementation will vary depending on the type and scope of the
project and what other implementation options are available.
Because [Terminal Services] and MetaFrame [Citrix MetaFrame from Citrix Systems, Inc.] allow both Windows and non-Windows systems (UNIX, Macintosh, Java) to access the latest 32-bit software (as well as many older 16-bit and DOS applications), under
most circumstances they can reduce or eliminate the need to purchase
new client hardware. This can result in a reduction in the hard costs
associated with the project and hence lower the TCO. Unfortunately,
this leads many people to believe that TCO is related only to hard
costs. This is not the correct way to evaluate the total cost of
ownership.
Consider this example. Company C has 200 employees, 125 of whom have
Pentium systems running Windows 95, while the other 75 have Pentium II
systems running Windows NT Workstation 4.0. Company C wants to upgrade
all employees to run Windows 2000 Professional, Office 2000, and a new
32-bit application being developed. In addition to this, the users need
to be able to continue using any other business-related applications
that they're using today. The company is trying to decide on one of two
options:
- Update all Pentium computers to support Windows 2000 Professional.
- Provide access from the existing desktops to this new environment
using Windows 2000 Terminal Services.
Assuming that the desktop computers cost $1,500 each to replace,
Company C is looking at over $185,000 just in hardware to upgrade the
125 Pentium workstations.
On the other hand, out of the 200 employees, the maximum number of
concurrent users at any one time is only 100. Based on this fact,
Company C determines that they could purchase two servers at
approximately $25,000 per server, each of which would be able to
support approximately 125 users. These two servers would be used to
provide load balancing and completely support the environment if one
failed.
Based on the hardware costs alone, the traditional desktop upgrade
would cost $135,000 more than the Terminal Server solution.
For more information on Windows 2000/NT Thin Client Solutions, or to
buy this book, click here.
