The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) this week said that the first half of 2009 would see the university evaluate whether to commit to a thin client solution for thousands of university workstations.
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) this week said that the first half of 2009 would see the university evaluate whether to commit to a thin client solution for thousands of university workstations.
Allan Morris (Credit: RMIT)
"We'd have about 4,500 PCs in what we call student
laboratories," executive director of IT services Allan Morris told ZDNet.com.au. "Many of those would be candidates for thin client." Other PCs which would come into consideration were those
in the libraries.
Morris said that thin client solutions had been popular a couple of years
ago but then the hype died down. However, he said he thought it was coming back again,
surmising that its popularity could be due to the push for Green IT solutions.
The Department of Defence has also been
considering thin clients, but for a
different reason. Its tens of thousands of its workers require
access to both Defence's Secret Network and its Restricted
Network. Without using thin clients, this has meant two PCs on many staff desktops.
Morris named the advantages of thin client as being cost of ownership,
easy deployment and the potential to reduce the university's carbon footprint.
The main disadvantage, he said, was that thin clients didn't work well for
PCs running specialist applications, and he wouldn't consider
making the switch for those types of computers. He couldn't think
of any others. "I'm not too sure there are too many cons," he
said.
One switch Morris was unlikely to make was XP to
Vista. Morris said the university was running XP, but that like a number of other organisations it would
likely jump straight to Windows 7 for its 10,000 PCs because to
shift to Vista in the middle would be too much work.
According to the IT director, the main reason wasn't any of Vista's foibles, but
rather how difficult a transition would be. "It's more of an
operational decision around the logistics of it," he said.
Even if Microsoft were to offer a free upgrade to Windows 7 for
those who took the step to Vista, Morris said he wouldn't bite.
"It's a transition we'd only want to make once."
It's a transition we'd only want to make once.
Allan Morris on upgrading to Vista or Windows 7
RMIT also had no immediate plans to move to
Microsoft's hosted exchange mail program or Google's Gmail. Morris
said that the university had decided to continue administering its email internally.
"We looked at it. It's not something that we've discounted
doing," Morris said. The main reason he held back was the privacy
issue and the ability to know that a student had received a mail
and at what time: "We've put it on the back-burner as something
we'll revisit."
What is on RMIT's agenda for this year is working on
a single gateway for the student portal, carrying out ERP upgrades for
the university's SAP and Peoplesoft software installations, and infrastructure revamps such as
beefing up the network on which 5,000 new Nortel Networks IP telephony phones will run or reassessing the lease agreement with Sun for Unix Servers. Morris
said he was considering Linux as an alternative, but no decision had been made.
The IT director will have to carry out these plans with the same amount of
funds he had last year, which he said was less money in real terms because
IT's "landscape" is broadening. The funds pressure could be dealt with via
process improvement, better asset management and using
technology to free up IT staff time.