By Clinical Informatics News Staff

March 28, 2017 | Dell has released its smallest, most power-efficient thin client, the Wyse 3040. The system is compatible with Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtual workspace environments, is highly secure, and easy to deploy and manage. Dell says the Wyse 3040 is the industry’s first entry-level Intel x86-based quad-core thin client, delivering robust connectivity options and a choice of Wyse ThinOS or ThinLinux operating systems. It’s available for $329.

The Wyse family of thin clients joined Dell five years ago with the purchase of Wyse Technologies. Jeff McNaught is co-inventor of the original thin client, and spent 25 years with Wyse before the acquisition. He’s now Vice President & chief strategy officer, Dell Cloud Client-Computing.

Healthcare has always been one of the biggest adopter of thin client technology, McNaught said. “The whole idea between VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] and especially using thin clients has provided over the years tremendous flexibility as the healthcare workforce evolves away from being constantly in front of a device in the healthcare facility, the hospital, the clinic, to a world where doctors and nurses… can now be in a whole lot of other places.”

The problem—especially in healthcare—is how to keep data secure while meeting the needs of a changing workforce and work setting, McNaught said. “VDI and thin clients do that perfectly, and they do that because of the way they’ve been developed. Our natural bias is toward securing data. That means putting a server in the data center or the cloud somewhere, you’re moving all of the sensitive data to that site. Then you’re making it possible for everyone in the industry to access it as appropriate no matter where they are.”

The Wyse 3040 is small and lightweight. It can be mounted under a desk, to the back of a monitor, or into a workstation. It features an Intel Atom X5 1.44GHz quad-core processor that supports up to 2GB DDR3 RAM and 8GB flash. The Wyse 3040 delivers 30 percent better performance than previous generations, the company said.

The Wyse 3040 comes with the virus-resistant Wyse ThinOS software that is ultra-secure with no published APIs and therefore no attack surface. Starting in June 2017, customers will also be able to choose Wyse ThinLinux, a thin client-optimized software based on SUSE Linux that has been further hardened and optimized by Dell for thin client environments. The Wyse 3040 thin client is compatible with all of the major virtualization software brokers including Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft RDS and VMware Horizon. In addition to the already supported Citrix HDX, Microsoft RDP and PCoIP protocols, Wyse 3040 will also support VMware Blast Extreme remote protocol in June 2017.

“Some of the things that healthcare providers have told us over the years, is that their jobs are getting more complex, not less complex. The introduction of wanting to see PACS [picture archiving and communication systems] from anywhere, the introduction of more complex communication tools,… we’ve been asked to make sure that everything we introduce into this space is capable of supporting that,” McNaught said. “This product truly delivers on that.”