It is fair to say that, for the moment at least, thin or virtualised clients are still a minority interest as a solution for what goes at the desktop/end user end of Cloud (or any other) infrastructure. But the arguments in its favour are growing.
One, for example, is the obvious next `big thing’ in client devices, the next generation of smartphones/personal clients. Another particularly applies to the cloud in that thin clients can now become the `canvas’ that carries the images of services created from a `palette’ of service components within the network.
According to Parmeet Chaddha, Executive VP of Engineering at thin client specialist, Pano Logic, the potential for smartphones to become a front line tool for business users is about to get high. “The Pano technology can now be embedded in just about anything and we are in serious discussion with a number of phone manufacturers. It will happen but we are not expecting it to happen very soon.”
The development area that is of more immediate impact for Pano Logic is how the network is starting to be seen as more than just a passive package transportation system. Echoing the old marketing war cry of Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy, Chaddha suggested that now the network really is becoming the computer.
“Networking technology now faces some serious issues,” he said. “It has to improve in several areas, such as bandwidth, latency, aggressive compression and packet loss. Latency is becoming a particular problem now. So the answer is to develop the network so it can be used as the computer by using in-line composition techniques on the network.”
In-line composition is where components of an application can be held, as images, at any point in the network. The changes that have occurred in the development of network switches and similar equipment means that they are now, to a large degree similar Intel-based hardware to those used as servers in datacentres. They therefore have the fundamental configuration needed to deliver and in some cases run component applications and utilities as well as performing their primary network tasks. This means that rather than the run all elements of a service centralised within a datacentre they can be dispersed around the network.
“We are starting to innovate ways out of the monolithic architectures that are typical today and move toward in-line image composition within the network,” he said. “And `image’ in this context can mean something like an operating system image.”
This means that performance pressures on the network can be evened out as components of a service can effectively be run in parallel in separate parts of the network rather than in a single datacentre, where the requirement for a very fat pipe is consequently made ever bigger. This approach should play well with the development of Cloud architectures, particularly once users start getting past the mindset of perceived differences between `private’, `hybrid’ and `public’ clouds.
It also plays to Pano Logic’s approach to thin clients, which revolves around a zero client that can be hosted on just about any type of platform, from fat PC to the dumbest of dumb client systems. This comes from the underpinning architecture which extends the typical intra-server PCI architecture beyond the physical confines of the server box. This can extend not only across a network but also across the Internet to deliver the result of services running on the datacentre-hosted virtual desktop.
“In this type of architecture we can then start to apply new Quality of Service (QoS) algorithms, and this is where Pano Logic is currently focussing development effort,” Chaddha said. “QoS tools will also include instrumentation capable of observing how different users work with applications and services, and this information will be fed back into the QoS framework to tune the service provided to each user and improve the quality and efficiency of their work.”
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