Dell select Linux to keep enterprise IT costs down

David M Williams
Wednesday, 04 February 2009 17:33

IT Industry - Market

This is where thin clients come in. Like dumb terminals of yore, the thin client is a specialised machine that exists to work in conjunction with a remote server. At a basic level, a thin client offers little itself but the capability of sending keystrokes and mouse movements and receiving screen refreshes back.

Yet, local printing, local screen caching and some measure of local processing can be employed to enhance the experience and reduce, ever so slightly, some burdens off your remote application server.

But then, this means going back to something ‘computer-like’ rather than dumb terminal-like on the desktop. A smart thin client if you will.

You can find thin clients that work with an embedded version of Windows XP. Correspondingly, the license fee for Windows XP embedded edition is whacked on to the cost price.

Here’s where Dell are being innovative. They’ve signed with Novell to use SUSE Linux Enterprise on their new OptiPlex FX160 thin clients.

This means users don’t have issues with local storage or multiple logins because they’re using a true thin client device, not a desktop-cum-dumb-terminal. At the same time, users have an optimised experience because they’re using a smart thin client.

And at the same time, the cost of the units is driven down through the adoption of Linux as the embedded operating system.

IDC Worldwide produced a thin client forecast and analysis for 2008-2012 in June last year. It’s $10,000 but for that you get 27 pages of reading. That’s $370.37 per page. You might need to take my word for this, but IDC predict Linux will reach 30.5% market share of thin client operating system deployments by 2011.

There’s no reason for it not to be higher; after all, even if you’re completely a Microsoft shop it doesn’t really matter what runs on the thin clients. You don’t join a thin client to your domain and its management is both simple and straightforward.

Linux makes perfect sense for many things, and not least as the platform powering thin client machines. Linux is cheaper, faster and consumes less memory than that competing operating system.

Dell have picked up that centralised client/server computing is going to become bigger and they’re setting a standard already by selecting SUSE Linux as the base upon which their product rests.