An Overview of a Cutter System

Cutter systems typically

  • Replace PCs with lower cost, longer lived, more manageable alternatives
  • Over their lifetime dramatically reduce costs, energy usage and waste
  • Greatly reduce the need for skilled technicians to support PCs
  • Increase flexibility in deploying applications and operating systems
  • Make secure remote access feasible and easy to deploy

A Cutter System uses alternative desktop devices connected to a network. The devices themselves don't run the users' applications, those are located remotely, across the network, on a group ('farm') of centrally managed servers. Whether applications are run on a traditional desktop PC or remotely is usually transparent and irrelevant to the end user who cares much more about reliability and good maintenance.

Instead of each user having their own high-powered PC (with the consequent substantial power and management requirements), each server can provide resources to many simultaneous desktop users. Users aren't tied to a single server, users are allocated to whichever server is doing the least work at the time. The design of the system is specifically to move the applications from the desktop PC to the servers so it's a relatively simple process to provide your travelling or home-working users access to the applications and data if wanted.

Centralised Servers

Centralised servers are usually much easier to manage than a large number of distributed PC devices, resulting in noticeably improved down time, mis-configuration and 'version skew' issues with applications. And data backup is much easier when it's centrally managed, not spread on the hard drives of hundreds of different users. When you have a number of identical servers it becomes natural also to install centralised monitoring and management applications. The better that systems are monitored, the earlier that problems can be rectified. Some types of problems can be fixed before users even notice them whilst others are spotted quickly and the overall time to fix reduced.

We have been surprised by how few systems do actually run monitoring and management software. Our experience is that modestly-priced and easily available software pays substantial dividends, if you bother to install and use it.

We offer you the option to have the basic health and maintenance of the servers supervised by our staff and managed remotely from our offices by our technical team.

Operating System and Applications

The design of the server subystem will be chosen based on the applications and operating systems that the organisation needs to use. Because the desktop devices themselves are mostly unconcerned about the particular applications and operating systems, this removes the need to replace desktop equipment when operating systems or applications are upgraded, and provides substantially better flexibility to meet changing needs. This type of solution can prove to be especially valuable if desks or workplaces are shared: when a user logs-in they can be given the desktop, applications and operating system that they are used to, not what happens to be already installed on the hardware.

One of the most common and lowest-cost solutions is when the applications can all be made available using Windows Terminal Services, as many of our existing customers do.

If users want to run a range of desktop environments such as a mixture of Windows variants, possibly Mac and/or Unix/Linux combinations this is readily accommodated so long as the detail is carefully specified at the planning stage to ensure that expectations can be met. Environments other than Terminal Services or Unix/Linux may require the use of server virtualisation and high-performance storage at the server end. This is not intrinsically difficult to do but it won't happen by accident!

Desktop Devices

The various possible alternative desktop devices offer different feature sets. They are broadly divisible into two classes: recycled PCs running software that turns them into a pure desktop device, or special purpose devices such as those from Oracle, Igel or Wyse.

Typically these will all consume noticeably less power than a standard desktop PC, be expected to last for a decade or so and require little to no maintenance.

One impressive feature of certain devices is their ability to key users to smart cards; this can be used in a number of ways but a popular demonstration is to show 'session mobility', where a user's session and applications follow them from device to device, accessible only when they plug their smart card in to the reader. Some organisations make extensive use of this facility from branch to branch and country to country.

Users and Needs

Most organisations using PCs have a broad base of users and needs. In our experience the majority of the PCs can easily be replaced by alternatives which involve lower cost and easier management. That's the majority though, and it's unlikely to be the same as 'all'. There's usually a small group of users who really do need a PC and not an alternative so that's what they should get. There's no reason to try to force a one-size-fits-all as replacing every single desktop is rarely either appropriate or necessary.

Cutter devices and traditional PCs coexist with ease.

We would be delighted to put you in touch with some of our existing users or arrange a demonstration of our system if you would like us to. Use the contact form to ask.