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  New Computing: Thin and Bear It April 19, 1999
That little Spitfire instilled in me a strange love for British sports cars. Before my family convinced me that Toyota was a better idea, I had owned several TRs. Like British sports cars, the PC has been a liberating force in many of our lives, but it carries a pretty hefty maintenance tag. Most large organizations just don't have the appetite for systems that can be unreliable. That's why thin-client computing has emerged as a new paradigm for system implementation, one that is likely to supplant the traditional PC before too long.
We had recently moved from a remote-boot Windows 3.1 environment, where all applications and even the OS booted from a NetWare server, to a local-booting Windows95 environment. It was our only choice. We had been supporting remote-boot PCs since 1985, despite the fact that Windows wasn't really designed to operate remotely. We had deployed Windows95 in a full remote-boot configuration in our student computer labs, but there were limitations that offset the management efficiencies. We never seriously considered this model for our everyday business users. Windows95's design is for a very personal brand of computing, with most bits intended to reside on the local file system. If you want more control, you install NT, which once had a different GUI and wasn't particularly stable (not that the latter has changed a whole lot in the intervening years). If you follow all the rules and don't install too many programs, Windows95 can achieve relative stability, even with locally installed applications. And when the network goes down, you can still get some work done. But now comes the requirement to distribute fat clients to thousands of machines across campus: immature version-dot-zero fat clients that will surely need to be updated before long, maybe even before we get them installed on all our desktops! We have dutifully searched for a workable solution, briefly looking at Microsoft's SMS 1.0 and other software-distribution systems, and have settled on a strategy built around a combination of NDS-based NetWare application file servers and Seagate Software's WinINSTALL software-distribution system. Implementing such a system requires significant cooperation between central IT and the many departmental computer and network administrators who manage their own LANs. It doesn't take long to recognize the limitations of this fat-client model. As long as everyone is connected to a high-speed network that is managed efficiently and is willing to conform to certain local standards, it works. But for many organizations, this isn't realistic. Convincing people to adhere to IT-imposed standards is difficult enough, but having to deal with remote users, telecommuters and business partners is nearly impossible. There's not enough bandwidth and not enough control. Until you can assume that all remote users have multimegabit links--and don't hold your breath on that one--there is no viable alternative to implementing a thin-client environment. The only issue is deciding which thin-client architecture makes the most sense. Many organizations find the server-based computing model advanced by Microsoft and Citrix the logical choice. You install a compact remote-presentation client on each desktop computer and run the applications on back-end NT servers. There are variations on the theme, but this is the essence of the model. Provided you install both Windows NT TSE (Terminal Server Edition) and Citrix MetaFrame, you can support virtually any client device, from DOS to Macintosh to Unix. You can even provide access through the Web or a Java client. That's sufficiently flexible. And while back-end server capacity remains a significant concern, MetaFrame allows you to overcome NT's vertical scaling limitations by installing multiple NT servers and load-balancing across them. Citrix has devoted a significant amount of attention to other issues associated with this server-centric computing model. With two million nodes, Citrix obviously is doing something right. However, the Citrix model may be a little too Windows-centric for some environments. You still have to deal with fat clients, even if they are a bit more manageable. The focus is exclusively on delivering Windows applications to the desktop. And while there is clearly a compelling need to do so in the short term, it's fair to ask whether this really represents the future of client/server computing. Microsoft may tout the potential of its object models as vehicles for integrating applications, but the reality is that very few Windows application environments offer a level of information integration, from both internal and external sources, that meet users' demands. A Web-based approach seems to have more potential. It's Not Just Static HTML Anymore During the 1980s, we used to talk about the need for DSS (Decision Support Systems) and EIS (Executive Information Systems), tools intended to provide people with easy access to timely and accurate information from a variety of sources. DSS focused on tactical information--the kind of information a manager needs to fulfill the roles of monitoring operations and making daily decisions. EIS, on the other hand, was oriented toward strategic decision-makers who were focusing on longer-term goals. Neither one has had the kind of impact that was envisioned a decade ago. The Web changes all that. As a tool for integrating information from a variety of sources, it is unsurpassed. Most new enterprise application vendors are either delivering or planning to deliver Web-based front ends, and the quality of Web interfaces has achieved near parity with traditional GUI environments. Tools that allow dynamic access to legacy data are becoming more readily available and easier to handle. And the organizational expertise needed to deploy and support the technology has reached a reasonable level of maturity. The final ingredient--the glue to tie it all together--comes from the portal technology that has made a stock-market darling out of several vendors, Yahoo being the most prominent. If you haven't done so, check out My Yahoo (my.yahoo.com)--not so much for the sheer utility of such an interface, but more from a conceptual standpoint. Today, most organizations point their intranet users to a common home page from which they can gain access to an array of information, provided they can figure out where it is. Portals help provide some structure to this information chaos, while also allowing users to customize their view of the intranet, integrating departmental, enterprise and external information into a single view. What makes this approach so appealing is the fact that it is so nonthreatening to users. Pundits have long lamented the fact that relatively few people exploit the advanced features of Windows applications, mainly because they are intimidated by the complexity. However, the Web breaks down some of these inhibitions. Tell people it's just on the Web and you will put their minds at ease. It should come as no surprise that building a flexible intranet portal requires careful planning and effective tools. For example, to provide secure access, a robust back-end directory structure is necessary. Given the relative immaturity of this market, it stands to reason that the leading vendors of intranet portals are relatively small companies. Vendors in this arena include Glyphica (www.glyphica.com), InfoRay (www.inforay.com), Portera Systems (www.portera.com), Plumtree Software (www.plumtree.com) and SQRIBE Technologies (www.sqribe.com). These are not exactly household names, but remember, Yahoo was an unknown entity not very long ago. Don't Think Either/Or It's tempting to try to pick a winning technology and ride with it. However, it's likely that for the foreseeable future, both remote presentation and portal-based computing approaches will have appropriate roles in thin-client computing strategies. From a management standpoint, the focus needs to be on finding the solutions that do the best job of integrating all the information resources a person needs to perform his or her job efficiently, while preserving a level of local control that allows people to adapt to a changing environment. Both of these technologies have their place. And remote presentation software lets you deliver traditional fat applications to virtually any desktop and intranet portal software, excelling at integrating information from diverse application environments. It's almost like my old TR with a Toyota drive train. What a concept. Send your comments on this column to Dave Molta at dmolta@nwc.com. |
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Forcing Fat Clients Down a Thin Pipe I recall sitting in a meeting several years ago discussing the pending rollout of enterprise client/server applications. We spent a fair amount of time talking about network requirements, server scalability and security--all major issues whose complexion was much different than it had been back in the days when the mainframe was at the center of our computing universe. But of all the issues, the most daunting one was desktop management.
