Diskless PCs Are Back
A decade ago, diskless PCs were all the rage, at least according to the vendors,
analysts and the sheepdog IT press. Even though they were cheap (not cheap enough,
though) and relatively secure from data theft (this was before every single
worker had a high-speed 'Net connection), diskless boxes never really took off.
With virtualization, Citrix and Microsoft's terminal services all surging,
maybe local drives are now a bit passé, at least for desktops. Recognizing
this possibility, Microsoft this week announced new
licensing options for Vista, including the ability to run Vista on a variety
of thin clients. One option lets the software run on "virtual machines
centralized on server hardware."
Unfortunately, only Software Assurance customers can get these licenses. Given
the cost of Software Assurance, I'll just run Vista on my hard drive, thank
you very much!
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/04/2007 at 1:15 PM