SANs have come down in price
Big servers have come down in price and ram is cheap
10Gb ethernet/Fiberchannel are pretty cheap now
Makes VDI a great technology
I-Evolve and other local companies have been moving users to thin clients with full desktops via Citrix for 6+ years now…That includes SMBs and they have been doing it pretty cheap.
You make good points, for sure… I’m no veteran, but I get involved in the discussions of a lot of projects due to the nature of my position. Maybe I am speaking solely of my own environment, but I can easily say that you’re making it sound easier and cheaper than it is. I think you’re confusing “most companies” with “companies that have large IT budgets”.
You’re completely ignoring my comments regarding patch and configuration management. These systems allow admins to be extremely efficient with managing the environments. I won’t say that it makes workstation management a cinch, but it cuts down on the cost and time significantly as well as boosting the security posture significantly.
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What size companies?
Under 100 employees and since they’re Buffalo companies not huge budgets.
pretty much what I expected.
Like I said earlier, I think it’s a great solution, but it gets really expensive to scale it up.
I can talk about large companies that do it effectively also if you want?
My point was places with SMALL budgets can do it effectively LARGE companies have a much larger IT budget to leverage.
But what is the cost comparison to do simply not doing it? What I am saying is that it is cheaper to manage the desktop environment, which stops a lot of companies from doing it.
Everything has trade-offs. Virtual is the expensive option. Managed Desktop is cheaper. Virtual is more secure. Desktop is less secure.
Patching…
Help desk…
AV…
Man hours…
PC Life cycle…
OS life cycle…
App deployment…
App troubleshooting…
Are all real costs 
Its not much different from the debate about moving things into the cloud
All SCCM
Patch management with SCCM/TEM(bigfix) is easy
You still need a helpdesk.
Meh, AV. I don’t think this option eliminates that need entirely anyway.
Man hours will be spent elsewhere, like managing the infrastructure to run it.
PC Life cycle, yeah sure that is a savings, but you still need to present the environment
OS life cycle? Is that an issue?
App deployment is easy with Patch management platforms
Y’all have really put me on the defensive here, which was not the original intent. I’m not here to tell people that they shouldn’t do things, or that it is impossible. Simply stating that from what I see in my world, which is healthcare IT, that a fully virtualized citrix workstation is not in the near-future. Trust me, it’s been on the table for us. From a security standpoint, we back it up as a great plan. My life would be a lot easier. I just don’t see the dollars in the budget.
There will always be pros/cons
Places that have a lot of people who do similar tasks are loving it compared to the old PC solution is the feed back I have been getting.
There are a number of solutions to turn current desktops into thin clients until they need to be replaced.
You are looking at the perfect world job tasks for help desk/desktop management where they can see everyone on the network, who has been updated, who needs to push a patch down instantly, and not the big picture of costs and labor. Managing PC hardware, keeping everything updated, preventing devices from going nuts on the network when someone brings it home and hasn’t gotten the latest patch, and data loss on top of the day to day work of assisting users is all costs. I know big companies in multiple areas using their VM investments in the data center to branch out into the user space and remove the need to update desktops/laptops and have a simple user interface for non technical users. Businesses want small data center footprints so building blade servers and storage servers and from a business point of view, they are building up their data centers, they are reducing the need to buy end user PCs has hardware ages and doing PC refreshes buying new hardware every 3-5 years.
Bandwidth now is cheap and hosted data centers can run servers in a cloud environment and takes away from the high costs. You can get pure fiber links to data centers in Buffalo now as well which remove having staff to support hardware as well and take away from the monitoring and 24/7 NOC.
Not just health care but other sectors are moving forward in IT and realizing the importance of not only building up their infrastructure, but reducing the costs to manage it on large scale and even small scale. Lots of companies want to keep the mobile worker which doesn’t fit in the traditional PC model.
So, Blackberry has a shitty commercial I heard.
Laptop + VPN?
I will add this in the real world patch cycles for desktops/laptops is a lot of work regardless of the tools you use.
Testing various configurations etc
I completely agree with LZ’s assessment on BB. They just didn’t adapt to the market demands. I have to admit, they/'ve fallen out of favor a lot quicker than I would have expected.
It’s funny how everything comes back around. When I started in IT everyone used thin clients. We had a 386 server with 286 clients over a thin bnc network. Now we’re doing a VMware implementation. It’s just a matter of getting some legacy application to work at this point so we can roll it out.
What percentage of companies do you think have respectable testing environments? Even if it’s just like 5 machines on a bench to roll out configs/updates to. I’d say less than 50%?
It depends on the size of the companies…
In my current position I work mostly with fortune 500 and they all have decent testing environments.
working with small to medium business’s and selling tablets… i can say that the move is coming and in large numbers!
will a tablet replace the laptop completely for every worker, NO. but will it provide internet access, basic features and give a data connection to the laptop when needed … absolutely
i work with many IT companies who specifically work with building ios/android applications and marketing them to construction business’s.
i have both for my job and rarely rely on the laptop, i use citrix on my tablet without having to worry about secure token etc etc
significantly better battery life, “instant” on , smaller, lighter and enough accessories to do anything 95% of people would use on a laptop
i thought I read that somewhere but i think i got lost
I hope desktops are here to stay because I recently spent about $25,000 upgrading all of mine.:pukel:
I condsidered going back to paper and pencil. 