Thin-Client and Energy Efficiency

This book chapter is based on a project entitled ‘Does “thin client” mean “energy efficient”?’(Pattinson and Cross, 2011) funded under the JISC Greening ICT initiative. This project was devised to conduct actual measurements in use in a typical university environment. We identified a test area which was a mixed administrative and academic office location that supported a range of users, and we made a direct replacement of the current thick client systems with thin client equivalents; in addition, we exchanged a number of PCs operating in thin and thick client mode with devices specifically branded as “low power” PCs and measured their power requirements in both thin and thick modes. We measured the energy consumption at each desktop for the duration of our experiments, and also measured the energy draw of the server designated to supporting the thin client setup, giving us the opportunity to determine the power per user of each technology. Our results showed a significant difference in power use between the various candidate technologies, and that a configuration of low power PC in thick client mode returned the lowest power use during our study. We were also aware of other factors surrounding a change such as this: we have addressed the technical issues of implementation and management, and the non-technical or human factors of acceptance and use: all are reported within this document. Finally, our project was necessarily limited to a set of experiments carried out in a particular situation, therefore we use estimation methods to draw wider conclusions and make general observations which should allow others to select appropriate thick or thin client solutions in their situation.