Question Design Server feeding multiple thin clients

[netsol]

texas, does 14 terminals mean 14 employees? more employees than computers or the other way around? just curious. logging in as multiple users with roaming profiles?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

In our case it's 6 full time employees and temps, but our 14 terminals are in different parts of the shop.

 

[ColorCrest]

Without grabbing certain quotes out of convenience for me, I can offer that the sign industry might currently be far from what you’re envisioning.

Certain studios, for example, whom I am intimately familiar with, have at least two mathematicians on board and are UNIX based along with their experts, which is proprietary and made not to play well with others.

However, the vast majority of their tasks require nothing more than solutions which could be found at apple or dell or hp or etc., and used conventionally.

Therefore, I recommend one consider three conventional on-premise servers; one for the office, one for order management software, and one for production files. Any or all of these servers can be segregated using multiple NIC cards.

Actual configuration with RAID etc., is another topic, notwithstanding email servers, etc., that one may need.

 

[ColorCrest]

Actual work flow and print file sizes are no different than 20 years ago. (In a well managed environment.).

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I'd be interested to see how the server / thin client setup works out for you. My history with thin clients were years ago and I'd be hesitant to use them again, but maybe they have improved and gotten faster.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Without grabbing certain quotes out of convenience for me, I can offer that the sign industry might currently be far from what you’re envisioning.

Certain studios, for example, whom I am intimately familiar with, have at least two mathematicians on board and are UNIX based along with their experts, which is proprietary and made not to play well with others.

However, the vast majority of their tasks require nothing more than solutions which could be found at apple or dell or hp or etc., and used conventionally.

Therefore, I recommend one consider three conventional on-premise servers; one for the office, one for order management software, and one for production files. Any or all of these servers can be segregated using multiple NIC cards.

Actual configuration with RAID etc., is another topic, notwithstanding email servers, etc., that one may need.

And none of that speaks to what I am looking to accomplish.

 

[netsol]

as usual colorcrest is correct.
there are advantages to thin client and vdi but on a larger scale

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I'd be interested to see how the server / thin client setup works out for you. My history with thin clients were years ago and I'd be hesitant to use them again, but maybe they have improved and gotten faster.

We have a meeting Tuesday. Things have advanced alot both in tech quality and speed. Some of the new thin clients have toying with have no delay at all on a 1gb network and they are capable of 10gb.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

as usual colorcrest is correct.
there are advantages to thin client and vdi but on a larger scale

But what he/she is missing is that fact that I want to build a compute/file server and not a file management server purely. I know of compute heavy industries some of them are here in AZ using this model. We have seen their systems in use and there is no delay on heavy cad designs at all.

 

[ColorCrest]

And none of that speaks to what I am looking to accomplish.

“Manager your tech at a single point.”

That is the admin console. Do you not understand that?

 

[ColorCrest]

But what he/she is missing is that fact that I want to build a compute/file server and not a file management server purely. I know of compute heavy industries some of them are here in AZ using this model. We have seen their systems in use and there is no delay on heavy cad designs at all.

I guarantee everything done in your shop today could be done on a Mac Quadra 040 processor and a harlequin RIP with 4mb ram, excepting drivers. The Quadra would enable connections to UNIX serving the order management software of the era via the Quadra acting as a thin client.

Your quest will include UNIX unless you realize necessity.

“What was old is new again” is amusing to me.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Your quest will include UNIX unless you realize necessity.

Well, I would have gone a UNIX-like route, but to each their own.

“What was old is new again” is amusing to me.

I don't think it's in quite the same vain as it was back in the pre-pc days. I like my desktop a little too much to get rid of it.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I guarantee work in any shop can be done on archaic tech, it's just slow and cumbersome.

Seeing as how UNIX is the basis of all master/slave computing it's most likely any option has some form of UNIX in it's coding.

In our case what I'm looking at is the ability to expand rapidly. We could build one "blade" now and as we expand add more cloud compute till we need another blade, then expand again.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Seeing as how UNIX is the basis of all master/slave computing it's most likely any option has some form of UNIX in it's coding.

Be careful here, especially if your main goal is to be nimble to change at a moment's notice. Proprietary UNIX has it's limitations and it goes into what was said here:

UNIX based along with their experts, which is proprietary and made not to play well with others.

Even as something as important as the kernel is not the same across all vendors due to licensing. While are certain UNIX-like (I always go with Linux) systems, that issue isn't typically there. Plus, due to POSIX, shell scripts and programs can typically be ported easily between the two. Even the availability of SDKs is different with UNIX.

I only mention this is that with proprietary UNIX, some of the nimbleness of future expansion may be affected. It just all depends on the situation, but that is a possibility.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

We wouldn't be going a pure UNIX route, we are looking more at a windows environment due to the software being needed to run on it. Also, the newer windows server editions make for easy deployment and management plus adapatability between VMDs and central core.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

One shop that I'm familiar with, on a smaller scale, was using Windows Server and app streaming the necessary applications to individual user computers. Just access everything through the browser, then it really didn't matter what the local host OSs were.

I don't think it should matter what OS deploys the virtual disks, just what makes up those virtual disks is going to be key (depending on what software has to be run on it).

 

[netsol]

if you are going to such trouble, do a vcenter. build a cluster and have all the advantages of high availability. do VDI off the same cluster.

if a host fails, you keep right on working. you add ram, compute and disk space without powering down. not cheap, but what you are proposing isn't either, and you will be missing many of the advantages

or

go to a cloud hosting company MINDSHIFT for example. you could start installing by tuesday with a good cloud host. not sure about your existing licenses, windows licenses have to be vlk not oem licenses

 

[shoresigns]

Our current bandwidth is not a problem we Symmetrical 1gb Fiber Enterprise Internet and our internal network will be migrating shortly over to 10gb Fiber.

I'm sure building a big server is fun, but with 1gb fiber, would it make more sense to put this whole project in the cloud instead?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

So meeting went well, they are going to spec out a a few options but we are sub $65,000 for everything we discussed as of now.

They recommend Hyper-V to start since we are under 25 concurrent users. But a 64 core 128 thread server with 1tb memory and 10tb of nvme is around $58,000, 10g thin clients are $880/ea and then there is licensing

 

[shoresigns]

... and then there is licensing

What problems are you expecting with licensing? I would think in most cases, each thin client would be equivalent to a traditional workstation or user. Each thin client that has access to a given application needs their own license for it.