Question Design Server feeding multiple thin clients

Is there any particular reason you're trying to centralize all of that computing power?

Just as ever shrinking manufacturing nodes have allowed for 20+ core counts on high end Xeon products, they've also given options on the other side of the price scale with low power consumption units such as Intel's NUC range. It's usually more cost effective and easier to maintain a network of full featured NUC's handling all tasks locally with centralized server storage. For the cost of one high end Xeon CPU (excluding motherboard, ram, power supply, storage etc) you could grab 10 x i5 NUC's.

The other thing to consider is core clock speeds. Typically in Xeon's you'll see lower clock speeds, but with more cores. Adobe, Corel and RIP software are generally horrible with multi-threading, and you'll see better performance with 4 higher clocked cores (~4GHz+) than with 8+ lower clocked cores (~2.2GHz).

 

Are you actually using a true server or a desktop acting as a server?

NUCs aren't totally bad. They do have their limits performance wise, but can handle some tasks. I have one running a lightweight OS and it does its job.

Others are true workstations, not glorified gaming rigs acting as workstations. Now, I'm also using true servers, not a desktop acting as a server.

 

There are ups and downs. How many designers do you have? It's a neat idea, but I can see too many downsides for it to be practical.

Depending on your artwork... it's not just processing power, GPU's play a pretty big role in photoshop also. Hard disk utilization... if you have 5 designers trying to save a huge file at once to that sever it'll bog it down.

The biggest concern to me would be... what do you do if the server crashes or has a hardware malfunction? Or a hard drive needs swapping...can you afford to have every single designer be down for xx hours while it gets fixed? In a perfect world you have 99% uptime...but unless you're mantaining the server there will be down time.

Theres too many obstacles and bottlenecks to overcome to make it worth while, IMO. You'll never get comparable performance out of a single system as you would multiples, not when designing is taxing on a lot more than just the CPU's.


let me know how your meeting goes - I havent looked into it in awhile... I don't think we're quite there yet, but who knows! Itd be interesting to hear what they tell you.

 

Having a bunch of thin clients connected to a server wouldn't be my ideal choice. Resource heavy design apps work better using local hardware. Relying on the network to run everything could prove to be the bottleneck. Don't think you could do all that using some retail router... probably have to go with an enterprise router... all this sounds like a giant PITA.

 

I would make sure to get get a server that allows for hot swapping. Now if it's in a RAID, is it a hardware RAID or software based RAID. Those have their pros and cons.

Are you using the server to host the software for the individual workstations or do the local stations have needed software installed directly on bare metal?

 

I would have it going through a switch, not directly through the router.

 

thats what i meant.

 

Unusual terminology as far as context.

What exactly is your server serving?

What exactly is a thin client as far as you’re concerned?

 

i was wondering if you are doing this to change the licensing scheme?

so you arr counting concurrent users?

there are plenty of companies that will host VDI or desktop as a service .do you have enough bandwidth to transfer your typical file size to a cloud host?

 

How many thin clients would you need?

 

this model also eliminates many types of malware threat, since you can wipe and load a fresh "virgin" image every day. . no undetected keyloggers, no threats lurking waiting for a trigger event. client plugs a flash drive in, anything he leaves behind in os is wiped at end of day