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Princely savings

lew_tech 8th May 2008

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.