|
As energy prices rise reducing consumption becomes an important way to cut costs. Increasingly companies are turning to Thin Clients as part of the solution. A side benefit? The lifespan of a Thin Clients is two or three TIMES the lifespan of a PC, and when it finally is replaced there are far fewer parts to dispose of.
Consider that most blade servers consume roughly the same energy as a PC, and then realize that with Thin Client technology one of these servers can host from 15 to 100 Thin Clients. That means that for every one server you add you can replace up to 100 PCs with Thin Clients, consuming, by some estimates, 90 percent less energy. All without having to change any of your existing applications!
If you could replace 1,000 PCs, in a year you could probably save over $10,000 in energy cost alone. This does not even take into account the reduced cooling requirements. And I will let you do your own calculations for CO2 emissions savings.
Another important part of "Green Computing" is not throwing away computers. Most IT departments consider it a success when they can keep a PC for 3 years, but ACP has customers who are still running the same Thin Client hardware they installed in 1999 - almost 10 years ago! The increased lifespan not only saves replacement costs but greatly reduces the amount of hardware that has to be decommissioned.
The reason for the increased lifespan is a byproduct of the technology. All a Thin Client has to do is display the screens generated on the server and receive the user input. The hardware required to do this is essentially the same whether it is showing an old application running on Windows NT 4.0 or the latest HMI programs running on Windows 2008. So while the servers may have been upgraded 3 times in the past 10 years the Thin Clients can remain unchanged.
For more information on ACP and Thin Client management software, please visit our web site at www.thinmanager.com
For an archive of past newsletter articles, or to sign up for this monthly newsletter online, please visit our newsletter index at Past Articles
(c) Copyright 2008 Automation Control Products. All rights reserved. All product names contained herein are the trademarks of their respective holders.