Microsoft licenses Vista for 'diskless' PCs

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Disk? What's that?

I have been running diskless for years now. It just makes no sense to have unnecessary equipment in a computer system, especially if they need maintenance. As a system grows, just add storage in the server room/data centre. No need to have spinning thingies all over the building. With fanless thin clients, the desktop units are small, quiet and cost little to run. Why would anyone think of installing a new system Microsoft's old way?

Really, Moore's Law has made servers so powerful, we do not need to have the desktop machines doing much. I can take an AMD64 desktop machine, add RAM, storage, and a gigabit/s NIC (if not already on mobo) and call it a Linux terminal server. Some of these can handle 50 simultaneous users for about $30 per user. I haven't tried dual-dual-core Opterons in Socket F yet, but they could likely handle 100 or more for $30 to $50 per seat. Compare that with people spending $80 per seat for hard drives and $1000 per seat annually on maintenance. Think of an IT department having 50 or 100 times less work to do on client machines... Gasp! We could fire a few techs, or perhaps, put them to work solving our problems instead of Microsoft's. Yeah! We could afford to add seats to our system. We could have a scalable solution.

The only thing thin client will not do very well is high volume multimedia. When you get to the point where a gigabit/s network cannot handle the throughput (need a local RAID?) or the user needs more than 50% of the CPU time on the server then, maybe the old way is the way to go, but I will bet it is rare. Most of us click and gawk and use less than 1% of one core of a hot CPU.

Posted by: pogson   Posted on: 04/02/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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