Dell Announces New Wyse Cloud Client Solutions

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.  May 7, 2014

At Citrix Synergy 2014, Dell introduced new additions to its cloud client portfolio of thin and zero clients and VDI solutions. These include the:

Dell Wyse all-in-one (AIO) 5212 (5000 series) thin client, a multi-protocol, solution that features virus-immune Wyse ThinOS and offers a cutting-edge, seamless design that incorporates the best of Dell’s display technology with fully-integrated, thin client hardware. The Dell Wyse AIO 5212 is perfect for organizations that want the security, manageability and versatility of a thin client in a package they will be proud to show off to employees and customers.

  • Dell Wyse quad display 7490 (7000 series) thin client. With high performance quad-core processors, Dell Wyse quad display 7490 solutions can power through demanding workloads and pack all of the hardware necessary to enable accelerated graphics and multimedia in a compact package. Designed for power users including CAD engineers and securities traders, the Dell Wyse 7490 delivers high-performance in a minimal package at an affordable price.
  • Dell Wyse Xenith 3 zero client for Citrix, the newest addition to Dell’s designed-for-Citrix Xenith line, enhances value by improving performance while keeping everything that customers already love about the Xenith 2. The Xenith 3 is the first dual-core, System-on-Chip (SoC) Dell Wyse zero client to feature dual-band WiFi and horsepower to drive two high-definition displays. The Dell Wyse Xenith 3 is certified for a wide range of Citrix HDX environments
  • Dell Wyse Datacenter for Citrix XenDesktop 7.5 is a new version of Dell’s end-to-end VDI offering. It features a reference architecture with configuration support for a range of applications, including the recently announced Dell Wyse Datacenter for Virtual Workstations, which extends high-end, 3D, graphics-intensive applications to virtual desktops leveraging shared virtual GPUs, and includes a first-in-the-industry ISV certification process enabled by the Dell Center of Excellence for Virtualized Workstations. Dell Foglight, a new option, increases manageability through monitoring of performance, health and user experience for Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix XenApp and Dell infrastructure assets.

The Dell Wyse Xenith 3 starts at $329 and will be available mid-May. The Dell Wyse 5000 series all-in-one thin client starts at $599 and will be available mid-June. The Dell Wyse 7000 series quad-display thin client starts at $729 and will be available in mid-May. All products will be available globally.

The Pitch

New Dell Wyse solutions retool thin/zero clients for the cloud and beyond.

Final Analysis

Product marketing is an exercise whose goal often seems akin to making a very big salad out of very small potatoes. But at times, the marketing process is critical to expressing and defining changes in a product class or commercial sector. Thin and zero clients, as we can see in the new Dell Wyse product announcement, are an excellent example of how this can work.

Thin and zero clients have been around for over two decades but until relatively recently their performance in the marketplace has lagged expectations by a long shot. That was largely due to technological limitations, particularly at the network level, which forced early solutions to be architected in Rube Goldberg-like ways that added to their overall complexity and cost. But massive, ongoing improvements in the price/performance of traditional PCs also consistently cut the ground out from under even the best thin/zero clients.

Significant advances in network technologies along with rapidly evolving virtualization solutions paved the way for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and a sea change in attitude toward thin/zero clients among both vendors and their customers. Accordingly, vendors have noted significant improvements in sales during the past few years, sparked by these and related trends, including BYOD and organizations actively seeking alternatives to traditional PCs.

But the core role of virtualization in cloud computing also impacted this space. Dell Wyse refers to this solution class as cloud client computing with thin and zero clients simply being endpoint options. That may not seem like a big deal to some folks, but it is elemental to understanding these newest Dell Wyse products.

Why? Consider the range of capabilities the new Dell Wyse solutions support. The Xenith 3 for Citrix may be the closest thing to what most people think of as a thin client (though it’s actually a zero client); a modestly sized network-attached module capable of running a display, keyboard and mouse, and supporting Citrix-managed productivity applications and other tasks.

The Dell Wyse AIO 5212 steps up the game, cloaking a classic thin client core in a stylish exterior designed for public display and appreciation. Some may see this as this little more than a skin-deep facelift, but consider business environments where public appearance does matter—high-end retail, banks and financial services, medical office and many others—and Dell’s go-to-market strategy is clear.

The Dell Wyse quad display 7490 takes thin client computing in a high performance direction via quad core AMD CPUs with integrated Radeon graphics. This new solution supports accelerated graphics and multimedia features, including consuming, manipulating and working with HD multimedia, 2D/3D graphics and HD video across up to four displays. As a result, the Dell Wyse quad display 7490 thin client can meet the discrete needs of users from CAD engineers to securities traders at a fraction of the cost of traditional workstation solutions.

These new products, along with backend management tools like the new Dell Wyse Citrix XenDesktop 7.5 and the established Datacenter for Virtual Workstations, allow the company to deliver end-to-end cloud client offerings for business applications of virtually every kind. The point here isn’t merely the availability of attractive and powerful new cloud client solutions but to fulfill a larger aim of fundamentally changing the capabilities of and perceptions around thin and zero client computing.

Some may consider that a simple marketing exercise but we would argue that Dell Wyse is pursuing a much greater, farther reaching and more transformational goal.

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