Re: How bandwidth requirement could be reduced when using thin clients?
Hi,
On Wed, 06 Oct 2004, Ben Higginbottom wrote:
> >It's also a requirement to tackle 2-8 Mbps bandwidth between the schools
> >and a central server-farm. In my experience an university often has at
> >least 10 or 100 Mbps between buildings. It's not posible to increase
> >the bandwidth to 10 or 100 Mbps in the near future.
>
> IIRC When I tried to break Owens test room, it was 30 machines on 10Mb's
> and they all handled opening open office at the same time without
> difficulty. I can provide you with Owens email if its not on the
> presentation and your interested in harder numbers.
When you say OpenOffice (OOo) on 30 machines, what were you testing? I may
be wrong but I would guess that OOo running on 30 or more clients, be they
thin or otherwise wouldn't likely cause that much bandwidth usage.
If all clients started up OOo exactly simultaneously over nfs/afs, that
might be a different story as the binary itself is a big file(s). If
anything though, this might reveal a slightly improbable situation where
thin clients are more bandwidth economic than their nfs/afs counterpart.
I realise OOo would load the server, but Knut's purely talking about
bandwidth.
Thin clients generally use more bandwidth than even lessdisks (or similar)
systems. The relatively short period of startup time of OOo might be an
exception of course.
Not meaning to be smart or anything, I'm just trying to understand the
test.
> If you face a similar situation, then instead of just crippling internet
> access, the computers themselves would become useless, unless of course
> there was a local server.
Well, he did say there should be a local server.
> By having even a small amount of local drive space, say a 16Mb CF card
> you can provide further redundancy.
Is this not is a new point of failure in every desktop and an extra
maintenance drain? CF would be more reliable than hard disks for sure but
such equipment would have to be bought in and installed on every pc and
rewritten when necessary. I'm presuming they are easily bootable on old
machines, I don't know.
PXE/Etherboot NICs are trivial to install and need no real maintenance at
all. They need a server of course, but surely a 16MB CF storage will not
solve that need either? To mitigate the fire problem, would you not need
either a local server or a full client installed to the hard disk?
Gavin
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