THIN-CLIENT FLEXIBILITY
At Cincinnati Bell, Jeff Harvey also turned to thin clients as he equips the first 800 of what he expects will eventually be about 3,300 virtual desktop users at the telecommunications provider. Over the next two quarters, he's giving most of the initial group--750 call center employees--Sun Ray thin clients from Sun.

Those users are switching from PCs running Windows 2000; the company needs to migrate them to a new platform as Windows 2000 approaches the end of Microsoft support. "We had no choice," Harvey says. Rather than buy everyone a big new PC, Cincinnati Bell opted for virtualized desktops generated by VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 and tapped Sun's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to convert the Microsoft Terminal Services protocol into the thin-client presentation.

In doing so, the company has gained a measure of flexibility. "Different departments have different needs. Why give them all a 9-Gb desktop?" Harvey says, referring to the power user's requirement level.

With Sun VDI, he can leave handfuls of workers on legacy applications, such as Lotus Notes running under Windows 2000 or 2003, without forcing them to upgrade to a new version under Windows XP. On the other hand, software quality-assurance testers can get Vista in virtual machines so they can test new software to be sure it's Vista compatible. Even though most of Cincinnati Bell has upgraded to Windows XP, Harvey expects there will be some Vista users in the future.

Both Arnett and Harvey say savings from using virtual desktops comes from users being provisioned automatically. Using thin clients also provides cost-savings since the software running them can be easily upgraded and their life expectancy is twice that of most PCs since they don't have moving parts to wear out.

Thin clients are priced at $300 plus $250 per user for the server hardware to host the software (20 users per $5,000 server, minimum), according to IDC's study Thin Computing ROI: The Untold Story. That's not so different from a new PC until you factor in the longer life span. The real thin-client savings, IDC says, is in the 93% reduction in configuration and management costs, along with a 72% decrease in help desk calls.

The low cost is a factor in Cincinnati Bell's decision to go with desktop virtualization, Harvey says. Among the problems he still has to solve is how to provide customized desktops to his more sophisticated users, such as those in engineering. He's expecting that the many options available from desktop virtualization will make that problem easier to tackle.

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