Dell Wyse guys revive the terminal

Dell has given the old computer terminal a full makeover.

Sometimes things turn full circle. In the early 80s, if you worked in a large office, you might have used a Wyse terminal or one by rival Digital. They weren’t computers but input-output devices that displayed information shunted down from a mainframe computer, and fed back keystrokes from the terminal operator. If you didn’t see them in offices, you’d see them in banks.

Needless to say, the PC revolution saw small businesses install affordable PC networks of workstation computers with their own processors, although terminals persisted in larger organisations.

The bygone days of Wyse terminals.

These days Wyse terminals are enjoying a new lease of life. Instead of connecting to mainframes, they connect to secure servers and data centres. Concern about PC viruses, the maintenance associated with desktop systems and the ease of stealing data via desktops is seeing terminals being considered afresh.

Dell, at a presentation last week, said 95 per cent of attacks on enterprise systems came from the client side. It has announced three hardware products, including two terminal devices aka thin clients. Thin clients ferry information between displays and the server/cloud environment which serves up an instance of a virtualised computer environment.

The first, the Wyse 7040 thin client, is its most powerful to date with Intel Core i5 and i7 processors. It’s a black box that connects displays and keyboards to a company’s cloud environment. Dell says the Wyse 7040 can support one 4K monitor and three full HD (1920x1080) displays using daisy chaining. It’s designed for government and financial services markets.

In secure view mode, it can display multiple virtualised machines operating simultaneously on different security levels. It also supports a fibre data link on the network side. The 7040 costs $1351 ex tax.

You’ll need to buy monitors and keyboard separately.

The second, the Wyse 3030 LT, is a secure entry-level thin client that supports virtual desktop environments such as Citrix, Microsoft and VMware out of the box. It’s Dell’s first client product at the low end of the market with an Intel chip set and comes with ThinOS and ThinLinux virtual desktops. It supports screen resolutions of up to 2560x1600 and 2D and 3D graphics.

It costs $455 ex tax.

At the server end, Dell is releasing a Wyse Precision Appliance for Wyse V2.0, which serves virtualised environments. Companies typically would install an appliance in a data centre where it would host virtualised systems to staff terminals. All the company’s data can be stored on an appliance, rather than being scattered among workstations.

The new appliance supports up to 32 workstations. Previously the maximum was eight users. It supports both VMWare and ­Citrix virtualised environments. It’s compatible with several Wyse thin clients, including the new 7040.

Dell also released software to support these systems. They include an updated Wyse Device Manager, WDM 5.7, used for managing Dell Wyse thin and firmware-based zero clients. The work group version, for up to 10,000 thin clients, is free.

There’s a new version of Wyse ThinOS (version 8.3) that resides on thin clients. It supports Skype for Business voice calling in both VMWare Horizon and Citrix environments. It’s unique to Dell, which claims it is virus-immune. There’s also an update to ThinLinux, and new data protection software as well.

At its presentation Dell trotted out some statistics that are sobering if true. One is that 90 per cent of all the data in the world has been created in the past two years. It’s why companies such as Facebook keep scurrying for new data centre equipment and ­locations.

Another is that 390,000 new malicious programs are created every day. Dell says 77 per cent of organisations have been infected with web-borne malware at some stage. It’s hard to imagine how you could collate such findings nevertheless they highlight the need for secure systems.