Prince Charles is on the right track. There are many benefits in addition to energy savings that will accrue to the company that moves from PCs to thin clients. Symbio Technologies offers a stateless (zero) thin client that uses just 4 watts of energy. This can lead to huge energy savings considering that the typical PC uses 80 - 150 watts of power.
In addition to the obvious electrical savings and reduction in carbon footprint, stateless thin clients simplify the entire network by eliminating the PC, the point where most failures and most complexity meet. Stateless thin clients contain no operating systems, file systems, or network addresses. Besides being more secure, by its very nature there is never any data on the desktop, they also eliminate obsolescence.
We have been carefully taught over the years to throw away our hardware each time the software changed. We are facing that right now as companies are becoming aware that their PCs are not capable of running the new VISTA operating system. Where are companies going to dump their old PCs?
Stateless thin clients don't contain software so there is never a reason to throw away perfectly good hardware. The software is loaded on a server and everyone shares it.
HRH is certainly on the right track. I applaud his efforts to generate support for a much more efficient and cost effective way to compute.
Prince backs 'green' thin clients
Summary
Prince Charles has discovered thin clients, and finds the notion they can help cut energy costs 'mind boggling.'
Topics
Prince Charles, it seems, has discovered thin clients, and finds the notion they can help cut energy costs "mind boggling".
Speaking at the Second May Day Business Summit on Climate Change on Monday, HRH referred to the example of a recruitment company that claims to have reduced its power usage by migrating to thin clients.
"Many of the case studies we received highlight the business benefits of developing and incorporating a low carbon strategy--not least the real, tangible, bottom-line savings that would delight the heart of even the frostiest finance director," he said. "The recruitment company, Reed, for instance, has reduced its PC power use by 80 percent by replacing 4,500 PCs and 400 laptops with 'thin-client terminals'. The mind boggles! I have never heard of that one before."
Thin-client technology has been around for nearly as long as there has been a computing industry, but has enjoyed resurgence of late thanks to the push to conserve energy.
Sun claims its Sun Ray thin-client device delivers a 75 percent energy saving over the average PC, not least because of better resource utilization. The Rural Payments Agency, which deployed 4,200 of the Sun machines last year, expects to make electricity savings of £174,000 per annum as well as reduce its carbon footprint by 260 tons each year, according to Sun.
However, Kris Kumar, director of datacenter design specialists 3i Group, claims virtualization and thin computing simply move the energy problem from the desktop to the datacenter.
"If you adopt a thin-computing approach and then realize the datacenter cannot cope, you will use band-aid approaches to fixing that problem, which will never be optimum," he said. Prince Charles also referred to moves made by BT and Vodafone to promote home working, and described the steps companies must take to tackle climate change.
"I am no longer at risk of being a blinding nuisance--I am a blinding nuisance! What more can I do but urge you, this country's business leaders, to take the essential action now to make your businesses more sustainable. I am exhausted with repeating that there really is no time to lose," said the Prince.
Liam Tung from ZDNet Australia contributed to this report.
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lew_tech8th May 2008
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