Thin Client Applications Span Markets, Part 1

Thin Clients are starting to show up in places once dominated by the PC. More and more people are discovering that, in most cases, if a PC can do it, then a Thin Client can do it as well. In this series, we discuss how Thin Clients meet some of the specific needs found in several vertical industries, starting with Manufacturing.

Manufacturing

The computing requirements of a manufacturing facility are met much better by Thin Clients than by PCs, and now that industrial software companies are starting to support their products running on a terminal server, Thin Clients are emerging as the hands down winner.

With a Thin Client system, the Plant Manager can deploy inexpensive, rugged, commodity terminals throughout his facility. Whereas the PC was a complex piece of machinery, difficult to set-up, configure and maintain, the Thin Client is a joy to install. To set up a new ACP Enabled Thin Client, plug it in and turn it on. All of the required applications and data are immediately available to the new client. And as the highest failure item in a traditional distributed PC is the hard disk, a Thin Client without any disk drives is much less prone to failure.

This does not make them immune to damage. A factory is often a very harsh environment, and there are a number of different ways that equipment can be damaged or destroyed. While replacement of a PC is very difficult, replacement of a Thin Client couldn't be easier. Replacing a PC requires the acquisition of substantially similar hardware, the installation of the same operating system that was on the previous system, and the installation and configuration of any software and drivers. This is really a problem with software that requires licensing, where the license file may no longer be available or may be keyed to a specific part of the machine. An ACP Enabled Thin Client, on the other hand, can be replaced by simply plugging it in.

Local power loss on a PC controlling a line can be a disaster, but that same power loss on a Thin Client is only inconvenient. A crashed PC may well require a re-installation of its operating system (and all associated software), but the Thin Client session continues to run during the power failure, and, once power is restored, the Thin Client is back exactly where it would have been if the power had not been interrupted. If I/O to the machine is taking place on a separate server (or on the Thin Client server itself), then manufacturing data will continue to be collected during the power outage. As all of the data is stored on the server, there is no chance that a file open at the time of the power failure will lose its records.

Many times factories do not have current backups. The distributed nature of a PC control system makes it inconvenient to keep all of the different machines in a good backup rotation. For a Thin Client system, however, the only machine that is backed up is the server. And as the server is usually stored in a secure location within the IT department, access to the machine for backup purposes is never a problem. This machine can simply be added to the list of computers that they are currently responsible for maintaining.

Often a plant would like to have a redundant PC located at each line. This way, if one PC fails, the line can continue in operation without interruption. Any type of redundant PC is a very expensive item, however, and getting one that is ruggedized for the plant floor is beyond the budget of almost every location. With a Thin Client system, that same redundancy can be achieved by installing a fault-tolerant (or redundant) server. This is done once, and has the effect of assuring that every client installed has been made redundant.

One more Thin Client feature that makes them especially suited to industrial applications is that they can be made completely portable. Wireless networks that are reliable enough to work inside a factory just do not have the bandwidth to meet the network requirements of a standard PC without a noticeable decrease in performance. For a Thin Client system, because all data is processed on the server, the bandwidth requirements are much lower. The result is that a portable Thin Client (either handheld or mounted on a forklift) gives users access to the same applications and data that is available to all other clients.

For more information on ACP Industrial Thin Client computers, please visit our web site at http://www.thinmanager.com

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