Well, they would say that: fat, thin or green?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, virtualisation, People, Windows Mobile, Hardware, Server, Networking, Microsoft on
A comment from Wyse popped into my inbox the other day, criticising the government for using desktop PCs instead of thin clients which are “inherently more energy efficient” (surprise surprise).
David Angwin, director of marketing for EMEA, claimed that “thin client computers give users exactly the same applications and performance as a PC and run on as little a tenth of the electricity.” Certainly, Wyse is one of the few thin client manufacturers who can claim to support a wide range of applications; I know one financial company who had to replace the first batch of thin clients they tried with Wyse kit almost within the week because the others couldn’t cope with video clips. But is that power figure the whole story?
Earlier in the year I was talking to Barry Goodall at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He’s spent a lot of time and effort greening the council’s IT and although he’s a big fan of server virtualisation, he has a much less positive view of the green credentials of thin clients after he disproved the figures in a Frauenhofer Institute report on green computing. “The report said we could save million of pounds by using thin clients, so we were quite interested in this! We looked at some of the details and things leapt out at us; in particular the power consumption of PCs was markedly higher than ours - we use Dell desktops.”
He was checking his Dells anyway, because Dell was claiming upgrading to model 745s would save as much energy as changing from CRT to LCD screens. “We have an electricity monitoring gadget from Maplin which I highly recommend: don’t trust anything the manufacturers tell you! It’s very easy and you need to measure it yourself.” His measurements showed the model 745s used the same 60 Watts of power as the Dell kit he already had; Dell’s 45 Watt figure assumed energy management features that weren’t turned on by default. “Energy saving features in the BIOS count for nothing unless you enable hibernation in Windows!”
But 60 Watts or 45, it was still a far cry from the 120 Watts that Frauenhofer was assuming for a desktop PC. That’s what you’d expect from a top-end home machine with a high-power graphics card for gaming; business desktops are rather more frugal.
That wasn’t the only place he felt the sums didn’t add up. “Although the report said in the text that they had accounted for PCs being turned on maybe ten hours a day, terminal servers are typically running 24/7. If you tot up the number of hours people work out of the year, even though it feels like you work all the hours God sends, it’s actually about 2,200 and the figures in their tables hadn’t taken that into account. When we plugged in the correct figures they supported the opposite arguments; with the number of clients per server they assumed, it was more expensive in terms of CO2 than a typical fat client environment. Thin client can be more energy efficient but you need to be clever and turn some servers off when demand is low; you have to be monitoring the workload so you can turn some servers off overnight and come the morning, start turning them back on again - though you’re running a little bit of a risk that maybe one or two servers won’t start up and you’ll struggle a little.”
When I talked to Jon Stewart at Cisco about security trends recently, he slipped in a few network arguments (as you’d expect from a network company). “I have a feeling [that] what you’re going to end up seeing is very thin, light application suites that are endpoint based and a very rich experience using massive network build out. It’s already started to happen; definitely BT has gone down this route. You’re basically saying the end point is going to matter less at a computational level. The display and the keyboard and the system that you interact with, is the most valuable. Think about Lufthansa going to wireless on their planes, they’re trying to solve the inability to do work when you’re mobile. Everything about handset mobility, you’re trying to solve work when you’re mobile. But each time it happens, less and less computational necessity exists on the device - you’re just getting the service on the device.”
But do we care less and less about devices? Again, you’d expect Steve Ballmer to favour the PC, but he told his audience at the Partner Conference that actually, all the devices that are getting attention are fat (we just need to make them easy too). “It’s ironic, people talk a lot about whether people want thin clients. And I don’t deny people want reduced cost, and complexity of management. I think we’re all hearing that from our customers. But people don’t want to really give up the richness and capabilities of a rich client. We even see that in phones. What’s going on in phones today? Phones are actually getting richer. That’s what Windows Mobile is, that’s what the iPhone is, that’s what Symbian is, that’s what Android is: all of these things are getting richer, and Windows PCs will be the richest, most capable device that most people ever own.”
Chatting with Peter Biddle, ex of Microsoft and now at UK enterprise social networking startup Trampoline, he suggested that as usual, what matters is both the device and the network. “Think about it; when did you last do any useful work without being online?”
-Mary
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Loading ...Comment by Matt - July 22, 2008 on 1:46 pm
In the bad old days, CPUs took pretty much full power at idle, running the idle loop. Now, with NO loss in functionality, pretty much every CPU is capable of entering low power halt. I remember the massive effect of applying “RAIN” to a Cyrix 6X86 running Win98, it wasn’t the CPU heatsink I was checking, but the (obsolete linear) CPU voltage regulator heatsink, which took seconds to go from uncomfortably hot, to stone cold.
So any client, thin or fat, can consume little CPU power at idle, maybe a “normal” PC with SSD storage and onboard graphics is the way forward, and I find the “ready state” power consumption more interesting than theoretical savings that can be achieved only when hibernated.
It IS good practice to have the monitor enter powersave after a short time on “screensaver”, as the return to active time is short and relatively painless. the merit of imposing extra startup and thermal cycles on a hard disk is less clear, the worst case being that the idle shutdown may happen just before it is needed again.
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