Some major investment firms have recently published reports indicating that Citrix will have to compete with a fairly new technology concept called a “bladed PC.” In this article, I look at what bladed PCs are and how their use will affect Citrix.
What is a bladed PC?
All three big server vendors make server blades. (Dell , HP , and IBM ) Blade servers are basically like regular servers except that the form factor is a removable device that fits into a specialized chassis, and multiple blades share certain common components (CD-ROM, floppy drive, KVM, etc). The result is that bladed servers are much higher density than standard rack-mount servers (20 blades can fit in 3U of rack space), they consume less power, and they're simpler to manage.
Bladed servers are perfect for environments where you need a lot of similar servers, such as groups of web servers or MetaFrame server farms. In the latter case, companies using blades as MetaFrame servers and can fit probably 20-50 users per blade.
Recently, some analyst firms have been talking about how "bladed PCs" might be a threat to Citrix.
A bladed PC is the name given to a setup where bladed servers are used as end-user workstations. HP more-or-less invented this concept (at least from a marketing standpoint ), and it basically calls for a server blade in the datacenter running a desktop operating system with a thin-client device on the user's desktop. Conceptually this is similar to Citrix or Terminal Server, except that there's a 1-to-1 ration between active users and blades.
Citrix and Terminal Server technologies allow users to share single servers. With bladed PCs, the blades in the datacenter run Windows XP instead of Windows Server. The “remote desktop” capabilities of Windows XP are leveraged so that a user logs on to “remotely control” their blade.
The main advantage to bladed PCs is that companies can get the best of both worlds. They get the simplified management of thin client environments with the isolated user protection of traditional fat client environments.
What does this mean?
For the past ten years or so, Citrix has been laying out the advantages of the thin client device strategy. (They're more manageable, you can reuse old equipment, less breaking and maintenance, etc.) People have really latched onto this message, and Citrix does about $600M per year in sales to prove it.
Unfortunately, analysts see everything in black or white. They want to compare Citrix and bladed PCs in a “which one will win” type of scenario. (Or, more appropriately, they want to know how the bladed PC trend will affect Citrix's stock.)
The answer to this question is simple. Comparing bladed PCs and Citrix MetaFrame is like comparing apples and oranges. There are a lot of similarities, but at the end of the day, you have two different technologies for two different situations. Bladed PCs are not a Citrix-killer—they're an networked PC-killer. In fact, bladed-PC architectures actually complement Citrix server-based computing architectures.
Choosing Bladed PCs or Citrix
Citrix and other “traditional” Windows terminal server-based applications work best when a few applications need to be used by many users. As I've written in the past, every company in the world can use Citrix MetaFrame at some level. Some companies might be able to leverage it for 90% of their applications while others might only be able to use it for one or two applications. However, there are no companies out there today who can use Citrix MetaFrame for 100% of their applications in every scenario.
The reasons for this usually come down to engineering. It's usually not worth bringing an application into a MetaFrame environment if it's only going to be used by one or two users. In larger companies you might find 50 or 100 “fringe” applications that are only used by a few users and that will never be loaded onto a Citrix server. In the vast majority of Citrix's current installed environments, this “hybrid” application approach is used. The main corporate or department applications are deployed via Citrix, and the remaining niche applications are deployed traditionally.
Let's contrast this to bladed PCs. Bladed PCs provide the “simplicity” of the traditional PC model. One user = one computer. This is compelling for several reasons. First of all is the fact that because each user accesses a single blade exclusively, stupid user tricks only affect the user that screwed something up. No one else (since they're running on their own blades) is affected. Also, administrators don't have to worry about application testing, security, and compatibility with Terminal Server since each blade is running a single-user copy of Windows XP. Finally, printing, registry size, memory limits, and PDF-creation issues disappear typically found in Citrix and Terminal Server-based environments dissappear in bladed PC scenarios. (Of course there are third-party utilities that can manage the impact of all of these issues in Terminal Server and Citrix environments, but each of these products adds a layer of complexity while the PC architecture of bladed PCs have this built-in.)
Now that we've looked at the basics, let's look at some specific situations where a company would choose bladed PCs or Citrix server-based computing. Bladed PCs, Citrix/Terminal Server, and traditional desktops each have their own relative advantages. While there is some overlap, each solution offers some advantages that the other solutions do not.
Advantages of Bladed PC Environments
- Users can access applications from any device over any connection
- Broken client devices can be replaced quickly
- No application integration issues
- Stupid user tricks only affect one stupid user at a time
Advantages of Citrix or Terminal Server Server-Based Computing Environments
- Applications can be managed on relatively few servers
- Efficient hardware resource utilization
- Users can access applications from any device over any connection
- Broken client devices can be replaced quickly
Advantages of “Traditional” Fat-Client Environments
- Users can use applications when they're not connected to the network
- No application integration issues
- Stupid user tricks only affect one stupid user at a time
Since each architecture has unique advantages that the others do not, companies need to look at this list and figure out what their best mix is. This is analogous to creating a blended investment portfolio. The best companies will blend all three of these technologies, and bladed PCs will “back fill” in some areas where Citrix didn't make sense. However, it's important to stress that the advent of bladed PCs won't prevent people from using Citrix where Citrix makes sense. If a company has an application that needs to be provided to a lot of users, the Citrix architecture is the way to go. Period. All of the benefits touted by Citrix still apply even when compared to bladed PCs.
At the end of the day, this decision boils down to one thing: money. In this case it's about which solution will be the easiest to manage (i.e. “cheapest”) for a specific portfolio of applications. The cheapest solution will vary depending on the number of users, the number of applications, the number of office locations, and the expected availability of the whole system.
This is really what all this (this whole “server-based computing” thing) is about. It's about creating the right toolset based on a mix of tools that can support an organization's application portfolio. Some people need a 700-piece mechanic's set while others only need a pocketknife. All-in-all, the invention of the screwdriver did not hurt sales of the hammer. Even though both screwdrivers and hammers are both used to build things, people still need the right tool for the right job.