Air Force considers dumping PCs for 1.2 million thin clients

This story has been updated.

The Air Force could send personal computers to the junkyard by 2014, depending on the results of a study to replace them with thin clients -- 1 million on unclassified networks and 220,000 on classified networks.

The Air Force Space Command said in a request for information to industry released Thursday that a switch to thin or zero clients could cut operations and maintenance costs and improve security.

The service currently uses PCs with hard drives, or fat clients, which store applications locally, while thin, or zero, clients access applications stored on remote servers. Zero clients consist of a keyboard, mouse and monitor with no local processing power, while thin clients have some built-in processing power to support rich graphics displays and multimedia applications.

Space Command said it plans to test the thin client architecture with 9,000 users on the unclassified network and 6,200 users on the classified network at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. It did not specify a date.

Space Command, which manages the service's networks through its Air Force Network Integration Center at Scott Air Force Base, said it wants industry input on an end-to-end thin client architecture to include all server hardware, client hardware, server/network-based storage, profile management capability, and zero/thin client hardware.

The goal and vision of the new thin client architecture is to allow Air Force personnel to access desktop PC capabilities through any kind of terminal, including commercial mobile phones and tablet computers, Space Command said. User sign-on to the unclassified thin client network would be controlled by Defense Department Common Access Cards with smart card tokens needed to enter the classified network.

The new thin client network would operate at more than 100 bases worldwide and would be structured to support 700,000 concurrent users on the unclassified network and 75,000 on the classified network, according to Space Command.

Teri Takai, the Defense Department's chief information officer, said in a speech in February at conference in Colorado Springs sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, that the department plans to move away from its reliance on PCs and shift to thin clients. Marine Corps CIO Brig. Gen. Kevin Nally told the same conference that the Marines eventually could end up with more thin clients than PCs working off its networks as part of a shift to a virtual desktop environment.

Northrop Grumman Corp. tapped Beatty and Co., a thin client provider, as a subcontractor on its $637.8 million Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services contract to upgrade Navy shipboard networks.