thin client
thin client
thin client
(networking)Gopher clients, for example, are very thin; they arestateless and are not required to know how to interpret anddisplay objects much more complex than menus and plain text.Gopher servers, on the other hand, can search databases andprovide gateways to other services.
By the mid-1990s, the model of decentralised computing whereeach user has his own full-featured and independentmicrocomputer, seemed to have displaced a centralised modelin which multiple users use thin clients (e.g. dumb terminals) to work on a shared minicomputer or mainframeserver. Networked personal computers typically operate as"fat clients", often providing everything except some filestorage and printing locally.
By 1996, reintroduction of thin clients is being proposed,especially for LAN-type environments (see the cycle of reincarnation). The main expected benefit of this is ease ofmaintenance: with fat clients, especially those suffering fromthe poor networking support of Microsoft operating systems, installing a new application for everyone is likelyto mean having to physically go to every user's workstation toinstall the application, or having to modify client-sideconfiguration options; whereas with thin clients themaintenance tasks are centralised on the server and so needonly be done once.
Also, by virtue of their simplicity, thin clients generallyhave fewer hardware demands, and are less open to beingscrewed up by ambitious lusers.
Never one to miss a bandwagon, Microsoft bought up Insignia Solutions, Inc.'s "NTRIGUE" Windows remote-access productand combined it with Windows NT version 4 to allow thinclients (either hardware or software) to communicate withapplications running under on a server machine under Windows Terminal Server in the same way as X had done for Unixdecades before.
thin client
A client machine that relies on the server to perform the data processing. Either a dedicated thin client terminal or a regular PC with thin client software is used to send keyboard and mouse input to the server and receive screen output in return. The thin client does not process any data; it processes only the user interface (UI). The benefits are improved maintenance and security due to central administration of the hardware and software in the datacenter.The architecture harks back to the early days of centralized mainframes and minicomputers. In the 1970s and 1980s, a user's machine was a terminal that processed only input and output. All data processing was performed in a centralized server.
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| Shared Services |
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| Using shared terminal services software, all users have their own desktop but share the same OS and apps in the server. Users are limited to running prescribed applications and simple tasks such as creating folders and shortcuts. See Terminal Services, Remote Desktop Services and Citrix XenApp. |
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| Desktop Virtualization |
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| Each user's desktop (OS and apps) resides in a separate partition called a "virtual machine" (VM). Users are presented with their own PC, except that it physically resides in a server in the datacenter. For more on the VM architecture, see virtual machine. See Remote Desktop Services, Citrix XenDesktop, VMware and desktop virtualization. |
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| A True Thin Client |
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| Without a doubt, this is the only bona fide thin client on the market! |