Ashton-on-Mersey School aims to give its pupils a full and rewarding education in a productive environment. For many years, the school has set itself exacting standards when it comes to teaching and has consistently reached high levels of excellence with its results. The school continually demonstrates a commitment to attaining the highest levels of professionalism. An inspection report on Ashton-on- Mersey School concluded that: ‘this is an outstanding school. It achieves academic results which are the product of exceptionally good teaching and learning’. The school’s computer system formerly consisted of 200 discless PCs, all of varying specifications. Initially, they used a Novell server to download the applications that they needed to run.
This method did allow them a certain degree of central management, but unfortunately it wasn’t as effective or manageable as the school required as they were still reliant on local processing and dispersed support. As time went by it became increasingly difficult and costly to manage and support this number of PCs, and the school simply did not have the necessary resources to deal with them. It soon became apparent that an alternative solution was required.
Thin Clients
In order to make the network more manageable, the school looked into the possibility of switching to a thin client system. In essence, such a system comprises a number of desktop workstations, or ‘thin clients’ connected over the network to a very powerful central server. The desktop device looks like a PC, but is actually much simpler: it is really just an input/output and display terminal, i.e. keyboard, mouse and monitor. All of the application software is stored on the server, which handles all of the processing and storage. The thin client system is achieved through the use of specialist software such as Citrix Metaframe or Microsoft Terminal Server. These create areas within the server which act as virtual PCs, complete with operating system, registries, IP addresses and other features required by standard PC applications. Each of these virtual PCs is accessed by an individual remote workstation.
There are many benefits to the thin client approach. A thin client does not require a hard drive, a floppy drive, or the latest CPU: it only has to drive the display and transfer input and output to and from the server. It uses less power than a PC and because, it has no moving parts (other than the mouse and keyboard keys), less memory and a central processing unit (CPU) that generates very little heat, it does not require a fan. There are other advantages, too. Because they have fewer components, thin client devices are considerably less costly to buy than desktop PCs. There are also fewer hardware maintenance and upgrade costs. Unless components actually physically wear out, there is never any need to upgrade anything except the server.
The school looked at the options and quickly realised that a Citrix server-based computing 0solution using thin client technology supplied by Wyse Winterm, the market leaders in the field, was the simplest and most cost effective solution to meet their needs. The school now has a total of 200 Wyse Winterm thin clients operating via NT4 terminal servers running Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 and the required applications. The servers also provide file and print services, user validation and access to the World Wide Web and email.