Why Thin Clients Are Back In - Part II

This is in continuation of the series by cio.com…..on "Why Thins back in".
http://www.searchcio.com.au/topics/article.asp?DocID=6100790&SiteID=19

In this second part, the article talks about how "virtualization" technologies have made a change to thin client computing & how "virtualization" gives the flexibility to users to use various different operating systems like XPP, Vista - without upgrading their current user hardware or by using simple thin clients instead.

"The problem with the thin client approach before virtualisation was that there was some modification or compromise to the end user experience in some way or another. What you get with virtualisation is an uncompromised end user experience where for all intents and purposes it's exactly like having a desktop. You can change the screen, you can add your family photos, you can change the colours, do all of that, you just happen to have a thin client on the desk not a full desktop"

"From a hardware side different people will approach it differently," says Harapin. "For example if you have an existing desktop that's running Windows XP, you might want to run Windows Vista, but the hardware itself may not be adequate to support Vista. You can run a virtual client and use your existing physical desktop but stream Vista down to that old piece of hardware until it's time to replace it with a thin client, but nothing changes on the user end. So it is horses for courses and depends on the end user's environment"

Very interesting, do read.