The typical industrial user is a special case, and therefore does not fit into the Terminal Server sizing requirements usually advertised by Microsoft. This article discusses some of the factors associated with most industrial applications that may make them unique.
Author: Tom Jordan
Marketing Lead for ThinManager - A Rockwell Automation Technology
So What is a Thin Client?
A true Thin Client:
1. Stores nothing locally 2. Has no high-level applications 3. Works like a dumb terminal does on a mainframe
Thin Clients and Total Cost of Ownership
According to the Gartner Group, the overall Total Cost of Ownership benefit of Thin Client terminals over standard PCs is about 32 percent. For a system with 2,500 workstations a switch to Thin Clients could pay for itself in as little as three months.
Forklifts give new meaning to “Mobile Computing”
Imperial Tobacco Canada has been Canada’s leading tobacco company for over eighty years, producing two-thirds of Canada’s cigarettes including du Maurier, Players, and Matinee.
Imperial is currently running a cigarette manufacturing plant in Guelph, Ontario, and a tobacco processing facility in Aylmer, Ontario. Their corporate office is in Montreal.
The Challenge: Deploying Inventory Management Software on Moving Forklifts
Imperial Tobacco was dispatching fork- lifts to move materials and products with an old-fashioned paper-based requisition and confirmation system. A computer- based system would be faster and more responsive, with greater accuracy and easi- er record keeping.
(Don’t) Stop the Presses
Thin Clients the solution when downtime is not an option
Known as “New York’s Hometown Newspaper”, The New York Daily News began printing in 1919 and soon became a favorite for is use of photographs, as well as its news, gossip and sports section. Its daily circulation of over 800,000 makes it the 7th most popular paper in the country and the second most widely read of New York’s 10 papers.
Some of its more famous headlines: “Who’s a Bum” (describing the Brooklyn Dodgers championship of 1955) and “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, run when President Gerald Ford refused the City of New York assistance during its financial crisis of the 1970’s.
Kruse Controls Selects ACP’s Thin Client Technology for Dredging Operation
Twenty miles west of Palm Beach sits about 5500 acres that are in need of a good dredging. And after being upgraded with ThinManager Ready Thin Clients, the Sam Houston, owned by Palm Beach Aggregates in Florida, is just the dredge for the job.
There are six pits on the property, rang- ing in size from 111 to 200 acres. When the Palm Beach County Water Authority pur- chased water storage rights they specified the contours they required with final depths ranging from 45 to 50 feet. Jay Wise, Ed Pabst, and Doug Coulter of Kruse Controls (the project integrator), along with Chris Branas of Phillips & Jordan (par- ent company of Palm Beach Aggregates) are building a new automation package on the 30-inch dredge to control swing, ladder depth and stepping ahead. This allows the creation of the specific profile without con- stant operator input.
Security Concerns Boost Thin Client Sales
A few days ago a company called Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ:WBSN) announced the results of the company’s seventh annual IT Decision-Maker Web@Work study.
Some of the threats they explored:
Spyware – Hacker software that runs undetected on a PC and is usually designed to monitor and report back any data the criminal thinks will be to his advantage.
Keyloggers – Spyware that has the ability to record keystrokes and screen shots.
Bots – (short for robot) – Software unknowingly installed on an end-user’s PC and can communicate with other computers on the outside of the company.
What Does ACP Do?
Here is the Elevator Pitch – the 15 second version of our product that you could lay out during an elevator ride:
ACP provides management tools and software for Thin Clients and Terminal Servers. Thin Clients allow you to run standard Windows applications like a mainframe, with multiple users running at the same time on a single server, dramatically reducing costs.
If the person is interested, I normally hear a number of follow-up questions. Here are some of the most common ones with my answers:
Thin Client I/O
There are two methods for getting data into a Thin Client system – through the Server, or through the Clients.
Getting data through the Server
For small installations, where input/output devices are not very far from the Server, and there are not many devices to read, this can be a very good solution. It is certainly the most traditional, with I/O devices being connected to serial ports or special hardware installed in the Server. As all Thin Client software runs on the Server anyway, there is no problem with each client identifying its input or output devices with physical addresses on the Server. This is also very efficient, as data doesn’t have to travel through the Client, to the Server, and back to the Client. However, it is very limited – a Server can only handle so much I/O, and if devices are far removed there will be difficulties in moving data (especially serial data) over the distance.
Upgrading a Glass Coating Plant
Several years ago, a glass manufacturer was building a new glass coating facility. They wanted to use all the latest technology, especially for the control and monitoring system. It was decided that one of the new MS-Windows based HMI packages, Wonderware, would be used.
The operator interface screens (HMI or Human Machine Interface) were used to monitor every aspect of the coating operation. A particular challenge in this application is that the customer wanted almost all of the points needed for process monitoring displayed at the same time. This resulted in a main display consisting of tiled InTouch screens showing about 1500 points. These screens are displayed almost all of the time
The control system consisted of 3 industrial computers in the main control room and 2 on the manufacturing floor. Each computer ran Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 and WonderWare’s Intouch HMI package. Two large PLCs were responsible for controlling the manufacturing process – one PLC for each of the manufacturing floor PCs – with Ethernet communications between the PC and the PLC. All required data was then distributed to the other PCs via NetDDE. The system performed very well, but over the time many limitations were discovered. The following is a list of the major issues: