Thin Clients Still Not Thin Enough On Your Wallet
With the advent of virtualization, particularly VMware’s VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface), much has been written about pairing a thin hardware client with VDI to ease administration and control costs. This hardware, however, still costs in the range of $300 to $800 per unit. Contrasted to a desktop PC, sometimes there is no savings on the hardware giving little incentive to roll out a thin client plus VDI environment.
Arguments such as “management nightmare”, “simplified support model”, and “less moving parts” don’t measure up to the economic realities that thin clients don’t bring a significant cost savings over a desktop deployment strategy.
Thin isn’t in because it’s not cheap enough to motivate an economic decision.
