Contributed Article By Tom Flynn, chief
technologist for desktop solutions and thin clients at
Hewlett-Packard
Two years ago, the
biggest decision IT professionals made about implementation of thin clients was
between the cost of a desktop and the cost of a thin client plus a virtualized
data infrastructure. Now, with the rise of mobile and the Bring Your Own Device
(BYOD) trend, users and IT professionals are asking questions such as how do I
port my applications to any of the popular tablets? Or should I stand up a VDI
infrastructure and allow it to be delivered to an end-point device?
Companies have felt
pressure from top-level executives and from bottom-level end users to adopt
BYOD and investments have been made in networks and datacenters. Now, the
challenge is how to bridge the gap and reap the benefits. The shift has been
made to a computing environment with the datacenter as the
core.
Virtualization
bridges the gap between the network and BYOD by allowing users to connect from
anywhere, on any device. Furthermore, BYOD highlights the things that thin
clients and virtualization do best, like securing corporate and customer data.
Thin clients are the connectivity devices of choice now for many in government,
healthcare, finance, education and call centers as they have no hard drives to
download data to, and all the programs and files that the user needs is on the
server or in the cloud. A virtualization environment also gives more control
over users and solves security issues by centralizing management in the network.
Virtualization can make updating software easy too, saving time and money.
A good network is
of course, another key to virtualization and at recent software and
hardware updates have been made to our thin clients that help optimize the
network experience. Improvements in USB redirection and multimedia redirection also give a true PC experience on thin
clients. Thin clients also have capabilities like auto-sensing technology that
locates the host server in the data center, establishes a secure desktop
environment in minutes and downloads the latest updates.
The BYOD model is a
natural movement for enterprise, merging the business and consumer sides of
computing and incorporating thin clients becomes a natural fit in the
office.
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About the Author
Tom Flynn is the
Chief Technologist for Thin Clients and Solutions with 22 years of experience in
the computing industry. Tom conceived the HP MultiSeat solution for education
and small business and is leading HP's zero client strategy. Tom is the inventor
of the Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI), which is based on the Blade PC
and has numerous patents pending. Tom is currently focusing on the
rapidly-evolving client virtualization technologies and the impact of those
solutions on commercial, healthcare and educational
offerings.