NComputing does thin clients

The X300 is the simpler of the two, it is a PCI card with three Ethernet ports and a remote box with a KVM outs. The basic idea is you have one computer to power seven workstations, three for each PCI card you put in plus the original.

The remote workstations simply need a keyboard, mouse and monitor to work, and it all runs directly over Cat5 cable. You can work with any desktop flavour of XP or 2000, but it will not support server variants. It costs about $70 a seat.

If you need more than seven users, it is time to step up to the L120 and L200. These boxes are basically thin clients that work over Ethernet. They also work over Cat5 and have KVM outs, but these variants work over TCP/IP, can be switched, and generally play nice over an existing network.

The up side to all this is greater flexibility and scalability. You can support up to 30 users at a time, and this version works with server as well as desktop OSes, and it will even work with Linux.

The board itself is an FPGA of indeterminate origin, but all it really needs to do is decode the packets and support TCP/IP. NComputing would not give me a price on this one, but I would expect it to be around $200, much more and it is in cheap workstation territory.

If you are looking for a cheap set of workstations with central manageability, NComputing looks to have some interesting solutions. There are up and downsides to this whole paradigm, so look before you leap. µ