Server Based Computing in the Education Sector

Now I'm a big proponent of SBC. But that doesn't mean I think it's the answer to everything. Have to ever heard the saying "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"? Well, I really don't want to be like that.

However, I do see cases where SBC is a wonderful fit but is seldom used. One such case is public education. Notice I said "public" not private. As you will soon see, there are differences that will affect the choice to use SBC.

1. Public schools have limited budgets.

Ok, so this comes as no shock to anyone. But take a deeper look at what this problem does.

Schools tend to use desktop PCs way beyond their intended life span. This increases support costs and allows users to mistreat the computers for a longer amount of time.

Schools tend to not buy extended warranties and often only get what comes free with the PC purchase. This is usually only a year with most vendors.

Schools tend to buy inexpensive computers from whoever has a great deal a the moment. I can't tell you how many times I have told a principal that their new desktops with XP/Vista home are not going to work on our domain or that the NIC uses software, does not function until the OS loads, and we can lot load a standard image onto it. Couple this with an even worse warranty (30 days, what a joke) and you can see that these computers do not belong in any business or school.

Schools also tend to spend less on IT staff. Not only are they usually understaffed, but the employees they have are usually the ones that couldn't get a job in the business world. These are often kids just out of school with no experience. I have seen many of these guys who couldn't change out a hard drive let alone troubleshoot a real problem.

SBC computing plays right into this seemingly nightmare scenario. Thin clients are designed to have much longer lifespans. The diskless/fanless models can take much more abuse than their typical desktop brethren.

The devices need little or no configuration to install. Often they are cheap enough to have one or two spares in a large school so that school staff can just swap out a bad unit and keep right on working. The workload of the IT staff is drastically reduced and simplified. With all the data more centralized, it would also be more possible for the IT staff to preform backups, something seldom done for user files in educational environments.

Schools can save a ton of money on reduced energy consumption. Not just from the lower powered devices themselves, but also from the reduced cooling bill from having to remove all that heat from the replace desktop computers. Going green saves you green.

2. Schools have hostile users

This may be hard for you folks in the business world to relate to, but students don't really take care of the computers they use. I have seen untold numbers of computers that have been destroyed by students. Some examples are floppy drives stuffed with condoms, fans stopped up with paper, RAM stolen. I could go on and on.

Pop quiz: What is more fun than destroying computers? Abusing them of course! Students would much rather download MP3s, listen to music, visit social networking, surf some porn, or anything else rather than do any actual work.

In fact, students use computers for goofing off, destruction/theft, and schoolwork. In that order, with schoolwork a very distant third. This is why you sometimes see school computers like this:

Thin client devices are nowhere near as fragile as typical desktops. The diskless/fanless models seem almost bulletproof. Many of them come with methods to lock USB ports; great for stopping students from loading software via USB key or from loading up their MP3 player.

Theft is also greatly reduced. Not only are these devices worth less than desktop computers, they will not work at home without the back-end infrastructure to support them. Why even bother to steal it?

To top it all off, if a thin client device does fail no data is lost. The user would just move to another device and continue to access his or her files as normal.

3. Public school systems can take advantage of E-Rate

Now I know I have the business crowd scratching their heads! What is E-Rate? Well, you can click this link for the long version or I can just say that it's a government program that pays for certain services for public schools and libraries.

Those services happen to be telephone, fax, pager, and Internet services. If the school system happens to be in a very low income area, then E-rate will also pay for the internal connections to make these services work.

In the case of Internet access that means Ethernet wiring, switches, and servers. If they are to be used to support Internet access, then terminal servers are eligible for E-rate funding.

Now E-rate only pays for the infrastructure. You have to foot the bill for desktops and user software. But SBC shifts the cost away from this area in into the expenses that E-rate covers.

So what? Schools get a little discount, who cares? Actually, E-rate can pay up to 90% of the costs of eligible services and products. Punch that into your spreadsheet and see if it gets your attention.

4. Microsoft's licensing for Terminal Server

I can already hear you rubbing your hands together and saying "I'd like to see him convince me that Microsoft licensing is a good thing". Well, guess what? It is.

I was reading through all the terminal server licensing models and trying to decide if our school system should use per user or per device. I noticed something called an "external connector license". Reading through the description gave me little information other than it was for users who are not employees of your business or organization and that it was a single purchase that covered unlimited external users. But there was a catch, when a license server is in external connector mode then It can only be used by external users.

So I called Microsoft's licensing hot line and asked for a more detailed explanation of what I could do. I found out that Microsoft considers students of public K-12 schools to be external to the school and therefore can be covered by the external connector license. In my case, I could license our students for only 14¢ each.

Now this isn't perfect. I can't mix teachers and students on the same servers since they would need different license servers. But for that price, I can live with the separation. Actually, the separation began to make good sense the more I thought about it. I could lock down the student terminal servers without fear of disrupting staff usage.

I also would have all these extra XP licenses after I converted student desktops over to thin clients and terminal servers. Why not use those for a VDI solution for the staff?

5. Users move around - a lot!

Students don't stay in one place for long. They could use several different computers during the course of a day. Teachers are almost as bad. How can I ensure that these users always get their data, and the programs and printers that they need?

SBC in the form of terminal servers or VDI solves the program issue without hardly any additional planning on the part of the IT staff. (That's good considering the average quality of the IT staff at public schools!) A mapped home drive to a NAS and a redirected "My Documents" folder would fix the issue with the users data and files. Printers are a bit trickier, but can be remedied with GPOs and log in scripts or with 3rd party tools. I suggest the 3rd party route for ease of management.

6. Fix software troubles, and maybe find a few loopholes...

Managing all the software installed on typical desktops creates a large management burden for the IT department. We have already seen how they are underfunded, understaffed, and under trained. This usually results in a high number of desktops with non-working software, software that has never been installed, or far to often multiple versions of the same software installed without any rhyme or reason. I just had my principal email out the staff a number of Office 2007 documents. Of course we all only have office 2003 so that didn't do us any good.

With SBC there is only a single copy of the software to manage per server. If application virtualization is used, then there need only be one copy of each software package per school district. That fixes both the management problems and the conflicting version issue right there.

But it also opens a different can of worms. If I only need one actual copy, con I just buy one license? Well, that depends. Most software vendors have figured out how to charge for this usage scenario. You won't find any savings from Microsoft or any other major software vendor.

The one market where software vendors have been slow to change licensing to prevent any SBC loophole? You guessed it, educational software. If you take the time to read the fine print and review the EULA you will find many educational products where you can legally just buy a single copy and have as many people use it as you want. Or just use open source software and not worry about cost at all!

Conclusion

So you might not be in education. But maybe you could be the guy who sells these products and services to public schools. Most of them don't know that any of this technology exists. Read up on E-rate and sign up as a vendor. Put together a presentation and go shop it around.

If you are in education then what are you waiting for? Go thin!

The network is the computer

Step into the time machine and think back to the late 1990's. The Internet was just about to hit its big breakout year (1998). Bill Clinton had just started his second term. Larry Ellison was pushing a radical new paradigm called network computers. What? You never heard of those?



Network computers (NCs for short) were small computers without any local storage. They loaded their operating system over the network. Applications and data were also stored remotely. But unlike mainframes and terminal servers, the network computers did the processing.

Just think of the advantages! Centralized storage allows for better economy of scale and eases the backup of data. In a desktop computer, unused storage is wasted. Here it can be used by anyone else. It sounded great.

These devices were different from the desktop computers of the day. They often used smart cards. Some of them were set-top boxes to be used in the living room with a TV. There was even a hybrid business phone/network computer. For a short time, network computers were media darlings. Heck, there was even a Sun JavaStation (a cool looking NC) used as a prop on the hit show "Friends".

Under Ellison, Oracle partnered with Sun, IBM and several small hardware vendors (like Acorn?) to offer these new systems. This team had it's sights aimed at one target. The Goliath to their David. The "evil empire", Microsoft and Bill Gates. (cue dramatic music)

Guess who won.

This same time period saw Microsoft license Citrix technology to create Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. The thin client had arrived.

Thin clients are just like network computers. Except they don't do any processing. They just display graphics sent to them from the server and they send back the mouse clicks and keystrokes. Really, thin clients are just a remote monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Dumb terminals had come full circle.

NCs and thin clients are kinda the same, they just have some little differences. They both tend to attract the same customers so they can't coexist. You have to choose one or the other, even if they are just alike. Network computer vs. thin client: it's like Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama.

Alright, snap out of the time warp and back to the present. Server based computing now has many forms: terminal servers, virtual desktops, blade computers. Thin clients have really changed in the last ten years.

The thin client of 1997 has evolved into something that I could never liken to a dumb terminal. The XP embedded operating system provides countless options including web browsing, instant messaging, voip, and more without even needing a terminal server. XP embedded can even be booted over the network. More RAM and better processors give them the flexibility to run apps locally if needed. Thin clients are now even available in a notebook form factor from a half dozen manufacturers. Of course, centralized management is still around and better than ever. OK, that sounds a little like network computers.

But wait, it gets better.

Citrix acquired a company (Ardence) that developed a technology to stream the OS to multiple servers or workstations over the network from a single image. This removes the need for local storage and provides centralized management, while still allowing each device to do its own processing.

And...

The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) allows workstations without any local storage to boot an OS over the network and connect to a terminal server. This has been a textbook example of pure thin client technology for years. Recently, there has been work to allow "low-fat" clients as well. Now some (or all possibly) of the applications would actually be streamed to the device and processed locally. Administrators can pick and choose were each application would be processed: on the server or on the client. All of this is transparent to the end-user.

Both those sound exactly like network computers to me.

Back in 1997 we had to choose between thin clients and network computers. So we did. Now in 2008 we can have both.

Now just look out for the Clinton/Obama joint ticket.

IBM and server based computing

The benefits of server based computing have been discussed into the ground as far as I am concerned. My question is why have we not seen a serious marketing effort by any of the server hardware vendors pushing the server based computing concept?

I can give you a great reason: they don't want to disrupt their desktop sales. Can you imagine what would happen at HP if the server group started a marketing campaign to convince us that we didn't need those big, expensive desktops? Fistfights in the boardroom my friend. You just can't have one product line with marketing suggesting that another of your product lines is a bad investment. A house divided against itself can not stand.

Now don't get me wrong here. HP, Dell, and the rest are not against server based computing. They would be more than happy to sell you all the servers you want. But have you ever gone through the drive-thru at Mickey D's and not been asked if you want fries with that? No? Well, maybe you want some DC5700 desktops with all those DL380 servers you just bought. Thats just the nature of the beast.

Now think about IBM. They sold-out of the desktop business. IBM is now a services and data-center company. Server based computing plays right into IBM's core strengths. And all those desktops that your not buying? Those were from Dell or HP, not from IBM. IBM wouldn't be marketing against itself.

IBM has a lot to gain with recent advancements in server based computing. Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware are all introducing exciting new products in this space. Either terminal server or VDI implementations would use lots of servers and network storage. I really like IBM's server line and the storage offerings are pretty darn good as well.

Sure, in a server based computing model there would be some thin clients to sell as well. But how much profit is really there for a device with such a low cost, a long life span, and rarely needing spare parts? I just don't see the value in HP's aquisiton of thin client vendor Neoware. The profit is in the data center and in services. In that arena, IBM is the current king of the hill.

Welcome to my new blog!

I hope to post my ideas and random thoughts here. I will mostly stick to information technology. Expect to see lots of stuff about server based computing and virtualization.

Please check back soon!