Wyse Streaming Manager
I've mentioned before that I'm no fan of Wyse. In past lives I've worked in Wyse environments and didn't find their Rapport software to be particularly intuitive and firmware upgrades without Rapport were painful experiences. Now the readers of this blog have told me that Wyse has answers to some of my problems and I find myself re-examining my biases. (Don't you just hate when that happens?)
The original problem I had when I began working in a public school system was maintaining aging PCs. (I say "aging" when I should probably say "Tell the Smithsonian I found their missing obsolete technology exhibit!") The problem was addressed by moving the district toward a server-based solution of Windows Terminal Servers and Neoware thin clients. We haven't completely moved over, but the drop in maintenance requests is already remarkable.
Unfortunately, solutions tend to bring new problems. Going into this, I knew that legacy applications and media-intensive applications would not work on terminal servers. I didn't know how many educational applications are media-intensive or how many teachers will only part with their ten-year old software when you pry it from their cold, dead hands. I run the risk of splitting our environment in two -- PCs for lower grades and thin clients for the higher grades. That's not good enough. I need to remove PCs from the equation or run myself ragged trying to keep them running.
Wyse Streaming Manager looks like the right solution here. I still haven't seen it in action, so I don't know for sure. If you believe marketing material then this is a slam dunk:
- Put Wyse Streaming Manager in place,
- Buy a couple hundred Wyse terminals,
- Profit! (Well, if we weren't a non-profit organization...)
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4 comments:
If you are looking at WSM - you should look at Neoware Image Manager - or even better - Ardence. I think Ardence has done more - especially in schools - are backed by Citrix who just bought them - and have great partnerships with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell, etc.
I'm looking at the Neoware site now and I am not happy. Why hasn't my rep mentioned NIM to me? Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try to get a showdown between NIM and WSM.
I know the 3 products (Ardence, WSM and NIM).
I tried them in a high-school environment where I had to install a "diskless PC" solution that could boot Windows XP pro on their clients.
My preference (and my customer's preference ;) ) is the Neoware product.
Thought the management console could really be more user-friendly, it was the best product for me:
My servers run linux (customer request), and I do not need a single Windows server in order to provide the virtual disks to my clients.
Furthermore, the heterogeneous hardware support in NIM made me able to support various kinds of hardware and still use only one virtual disk image that can boot all my clients (among theme, there are AMD and Intel based PCs).
On the server side, it is really easy to write scripts that will automate most of the admin tasks.
The high-school that use NIM is the one place where I have the less interventions to do (and usually, when I have to go there, it is because of some hardware failure!)
Zack:
That's great to know. The heterogeneous environment is a big selling point for NIM. I'm concerned about getting locked into Wyse if I go with WSM. Ardence looks like too much overhead to me. I don't really want to get into Citrix unless I have to.
So I really want to like NIM but like I said in my most recent post, Neoware doesn't seem very energetic about supporting it. Wyse is at least putting some effort into WSM.
I still plan on looking at both WSM and NIM before making a decision.
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