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Citrix/Thin & Fat

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by teegood

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Hello,

I am a network manager for a company with 250 seats. We manage 30 health care (family practices) sites by taking care of their billing, HR, Internet access, email, etc. For billing, we use an RS6000 Unix server running AIX Operating system. The software vendor of this server is suggesting that we go to Citrix. This comes AFTER we deployed and oufitted all of our sites with Windows 2000 Pro or better..full fat clients. Right now, our billing server is text based and the software vendor is adding GUI and there is no chance of this software taking advantage of a fat client. I need advice..don't know much about Citrix..does not seem to be a good fit..our sites run DSL (most 256K) but wouldnt it be better to incorporate a serverthat caches information on the fat client, taking advantage of powerful client hardware?
Thank you..

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by ehuq

Citrix provides thin client solution. So, in your case, the billing software vendor will run their client on the Citrix server. The remote sites will run thin client on their workstations connecting to the Citrix server. On the Workstations/remote sites, the billing system interface is thin client. And based on Citrix's architecture the data transfer between the server and client is minimum. It is almost like if you are running an X-client on your desktop which actually is connecting to your AIX or Sun box. Obviously you will need a Citrix server. The billing system user interface then sits on the Citrix server and uses the Citrix server's processor and memory for the user interface.
I support a company who deals with health care billingand has a Citrix server server 5 clients with 15 user access. They all go over DSL lines. We run Citrix Metaframe 1.8 on W2k. We have occassional printing issues, but other than that it has been pretty stable.
One of the thing I am not sure from your posting is how they are connecting today (without the GUI), are they telnet'ing? If you have upgraded the workstations to accomodate the new GUI, I am not sure how the vendor was planning to connecting the remote sites to your AIX machine over DSL.
Citrix is probably a the best solution, but given the fact you spent money on the workstations, it should have been brought up before upgrading these workstations.

Hope this helps.

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