ClearCube R1200 User Manual download pdf (Page 13)

Principled Technologies, Inc.: ClearCube PC Blade vs. thin client

performance in typical office application scenarios

As you can see, the results were quite similar to those on the Excel XML file open task, though this time the single

PC Blade outperformed both single thin clients. The reason for this difference is probably the load the server was

facing. While each PC Blade ran the XML processing locally, the thin clients were relying on the server to do that

work--and the server also had to supply the data files and handle the Word XML processing for them at the same

time.

As Figure 15 shows, with 5 active clients the PC Blades, which, like the thin clients, had to rely on the server to

supply the files, ran at 47 percent the speed of the single-PC Blade case. The thin clients, by contrast, ran at only

20 percent of the speed of the single PC Blade.

PERFORMANCE RESULTS (in seconds) COMPARATIVE RATING

PC blade

solution Thin-client solutions

PC blade

solution Thin-client solutions

ClearCube

R1200 PC

Blade Sun Ray 2

Wyse

Winterm

5150SE

Number of

simultaneously

active clients

ClearCube

R1200 PC

Blade Sun Ray 2

Wyse

Winterm

5150SE

10.5 15.3 12.2 1

1.00 0.69 0.86

12.8 26.1 25.2 2

0.82 0.40 0.42

15.8 34.0 33.1 3

0.66 0.31 0.32

18.6 43.4 44.7 4

0.56 0.24 0.23

22.3 51.3 53.6 5

0.47 0.20 0.20

In the five-client case, these percentage differences translated into time savings of close to 30 seconds for the PC

Blades as compared to the thin clients.

As we noted earlier, to provide an apples-to-apples comparison, we forced all the clients to store the data they

needed on the server. The PC Blades, of course, could have stored the data locally. Had we allowed the PC

Blades to do so, their performance edge in the multi-client tests would almost certainly have been much larger.

Uneven service

In all of our results discussions to this point, we have focused on average response time. In multi-user networks,

all systems of the same type should generally receive the same type of response time when performing the same

operations on the same files. In our tests, that was certainly the case with the PC Blades. Consider, for example,

the Microsoft PowerPoint change view task. Figure 16 shows the range of response times for one run of the five-

client tests of this task on each of the client types. The PC Blades, as we would hope and expect, showed

remarkably little variance, with the difference between the best response time a system received (4.9 seconds)

and the worst (5.7 seconds) under a second.

Range of response times for the five-client results on the Microsoft PowerPoint change view task

ClearCube R1200

PC Blade

Sun Ray 2

Wyse Winterm

5150SE

Minimum response time (seconds) 4.9 14.1 16.8

Maximum response time (seconds) 5.7 30.8 27.9

Range of response times (seconds) 0.8 16.7 11.1

As the same table shows, on some tasks the thin clients, by contrast, delivered very different response times to

each user, a phenomenon we refer to as "uneven service." In the five-client test of this PowerPoint operation, one

Sun Ray 2 thin client finished the test in 14.1 seconds, while another took 30.8 seconds--a difference of 16.7

seconds. The Wyse Winterm 5150SE thin clients ranged in completion times from 16.8 seconds to 27.9 seconds,

a difference of 11.1 seconds. This level of uneven service would result in different users having very different

computing experiences, something IT managers generally want to avoid.

Figure 16: Range of response times for the one run of the five-client test for the PowerPoint change view task for all three

client platforms. Lower numbers are better.

Figure 15: Results for the Microsoft Word XML file open task for all three client platforms. All results are normalized to the

one-client ClearCube R1200 PC Blade result. Higher comparative ratings are better.

1 2 ... 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 ... 35 36

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ClearCube R1200 User Manual Page 13

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