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We took a look at seven thin client terminals from five manufacturers, HP, Ipex, Maxspeed, Sun Microsystems, and Wyse in January. In that review, we looked into the various different clients and embedded operating systems currently available for deployment, from the Windows embedded devices through to the Linux machines and then on to the Sun units.
This time around, we looked at products that help the operators and administrators of thin client networks to get the best, or even increased, performance from their thin client infrastructure. These applications on review are primarily concerned with optimising the server side of the connection.
As with all things IT, definite performance gains can be had by those willing to start tweaking and modifying their systems and network. And thin client environments can be ripe for this type of tweaking.
Thin client machines themselves by their very nature should technically need replacement very rarely. However, with their growing popularity, users are beginning to demand more intensive tasks of them that they may not necessarily be capable of in their current state.
A thin client is a dumb terminal with very limited processing capabilities, therefore whatever processing power the end user machine exhibits is derived through the network cable from the server. This brings up the two critical points in the thin client equation: the network and switching infrastructure, and the server power/capacity.
The applications in this review basically take stock of the traffic running across the network and server and work with it to prioritise the flow of data to the critical machines and applications that need it. This is similar to how an individual computer manages multitasking: non-critical tasks are given a lower priority than performance-critical tasks such as multimedia or processor intensive data crunching.
