Gaston County Systems Administrator Fred Hinson was on the lookout for an economical client for their Citrix environment to help cut costs and address performance and management challenges posed by their existing Windows-embedded clients. His most pressing need was for a health department clinic, where costly convertible tablets provided sought-after mobility but were impacting productivity with frequent lost WiFi connections. In other government offices, the current Windows-embedded clients were proving difficult and time-consuming to manage.

After discovering ViewSonic® SC-T25 Raspberry Pi 3 Thin Clients at Citrix Synergy-Las Vegas in May 2016, Hinson immediately knew he wanted to try them out. With a powerful Broadcom® BCM2837 quad core ARM Cortex CPU and Stratodesk® NoTouch® OS, the Citrix® HDX™ optimized clients were exactly the high-performance, cost-effective solution he was looking for.

“It took me about eight months to complete some projects already in progress and align the time and resources to purchase a couple for demo,” said Hinson. “Needless to say, since we ended up purchasing them, they were impressed.”

Hinson was impressed as well, and his team quickly purchased more than 20 thin clients for deployment in the health clinic and the county’s main social services site. Since this initial deployment, the IT department has purchased and deployed 30 more in offices throughout the county.

The initial Health department deployment has been a resounding success. The new SC-T25 Thin Clients mounted on wheeled carts maintain practitioner mobility, while eliminating the several problems presented by the convertible tablets and conventional PCs.

“The nurses love not having to carry around a cumbersome convertible laptop,” said Hinson. “The SC-T25 thin clients really helped decrease access and login times – and thankfully the dropped connections issue is a thing of the past.”

The performance delivered by the SC-T25 in every deployment location, he said, has been beyond their expectations.

“They’ve outperformed anything we’ve tried in the past, from physical fat clients to thin clients, even elite powered workstations,” said Hinson. “These devices have been truly exceptional; they really work flawlessly over wireless. I’m very impressed with the performance.”

Plus, said Hinson, the savings have also been tremendous.

“Our convertible laptop devices were about $1400 each, with the SC-T25 Raspberry Pi 3 thin clients on wheeled carts the practitioners can have a workstation at their desks and leverage wireless where needed for a fraction of the cost.”

Once deployed, the benefits kept getting better, with the Stratodesk management capabilities shining above any other client management platforms Hinson has experienced. Hinson said there was no comparison to their most recent Windowsembedded clients, which were a nightmare to manage, requiring the set up and maintenance of a separate management server and added knowledge resources. Plus, he said, even after taking those measures, the device management was very difficult to control.

“Stratodesk truly lives up to their ‘NoTouch’ name,” said Hinson. “It’s an easy drag-and-drop interface and it has been an absolute best-in-class product as far as we are concerned.”