Costings of terminal services

[fafster]

How much, all things considered, would it cost to turn a class of 30 machines into thin clients? I'm hearing things about Sun Secure Global Desktop being cheaper that Citrix etc. but I need advice.

We'll finish paying for our last lot of machines this year, so I want to see if it'll be cheaper to convert a room than buy new machines.

Cheers.

[Geoff]

You don't really see any cost savings in the short term (infact it's probably more expensive). But they do mount up over time as you do not have to keep buying £300 desktop PCs every year.

[Netman]

I'm just looking into the same thing here - it would cost in the region of £15k for a room using a Sun setup - I don't have the prices back yet for Citrix, but am expecting it to be more. As was rightly said though, it's not the initial cost so much as the tco you need to look at. Sun's thin client costs £125 and has an expected life of 12 years!!

[fafster]

If we were to go down the Sun Secure Global Desktop route, would we be able to keep our old machines as the clients until we were able to buy snazzy new ones?

[dhicks]

How much, all things considered, would it cost to turn a class of 30 machines into thin clients?

Depends what sort of thing clients. We run our Prep IT room on Edubuntu, which didn't cost anything at all. We had to pay for server hardware (we bought a Dell tower server for around £2000, but that was with 1TB of storage) and a switch (around £200). That's it. You could splash out on some IDE-CF converters and some CF cards if you wanted your thin client stations to boot from ultra-quiet, low-power solid state memory instead of harddrive or CD.

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David Hicks

[fafster]

Are you using openoffice, or crossover office to keep the staff happy?

[placky]

We have made use of many old computers by simply creating a powerful sever (i.e two dual core chips 4Gig ram etc) and run Windows fundamentals for legacy PC's. With our current licensing plan we can change to Windows fundamentals with no extra cos (as long as the PC's have OEM OS)

The computers then run a autologon script to login with a limited account that only gives them a icon on the desktop (nothing in the start menu etc) to Remote desktop to the terminal server. These computers have been running like this for a few years now and we have added Igels to the network that also run off these terminal servers very cheeply (i think they were around £200 each)