Thin Client Workstations

A thin client is a computer which depends heavily on some other computer (its server) to fulfill its traditional computational roles.

This is in contrast to the traditional "fat client", a computer designed to take on these roles by itself. The exact roles assumed by the server may vary, from providing data persistence (for example, for diskless nodes) to actual information processing on the client's behalf.

Because of this setup, the hardware in the Thin Client has much less to do so typically a Thin Client has very little RAM, and generally no hard disk. The operating system is loaded into RAM from flash memory, or may even execute entirely on flash memory.

The operating systems on most thin clients are generally invisible to the user an are typically Linux, Windows Embedded, or Windows CE.

Thin clients take up very little space, use much less energy than PCs and are virtually mantenance free.

Its almost a blast from the past, where all processing was done on large Mini or Mainframe computers and users accessed them using sumple dumb terminals.

So a typical thin client IT environment would consiste of a powerful Terminal Server (Remote Desktop Services) hosting many sessions from many users all using thin clients. The user sessions on the Terminal Server are all separate and disting from each other. In Larger-scale deployments, several Terminal Servers will be in operation and users logging-on with be directed by brokering software to a session on any given server based on individual server loading.

Take this whole scenarion a step further and magine the Terminal servers are no on the premisis, but in a remote data centre, the trhin clients then simple talk to theier Terminal Servers over the internet!

Here we are stepping towards "Cloud Computing"

Michells IT can supply, install and configure Thin Clients and Terminal Servers, or supply hosted Terminal servers if your business would rather keep a simpler IT infrastructure.