Discussion on:

Coming soon to your data center... freaking huge workstations!?

I could see using these for our Paris office. There are 5 computers and 2 servers there. This would allow the workstations to be maintained locally, instead of remotely making them last longer and have complete control over them.

Would you have enough bandwidth to support it?

it would use less than a traditional LAN or WAN, all that is getting transferred are the pictures and in some cases (not all) USB device data!

We'd need to see what's included in the network stream. If
you're looking at huge graphics stuff, that would add up to a
lot of data.

You are still transmitting the same screen data no matter what, no?

But other than my own personal greed this looks more like kit looking for a market....

I see these as more an entry level server for high availability services, like a small webhosting company data center.

instead of starting with a 20,000 rackmont system [ even though much more capable ] a startup could use these and avoid the issue from being cash strapped and needing good server units.

the remote access component could make it easier to keep the systems maintained, without having to be in the server room, or having the overhead of running remote desktop support, with possible security issues from that support.

In fact, they will probably buy a lot of them. They need lots of computing power, and because they have so many computers per trader, they need to put them in a back room somewhere, out of the way.

That's a rather limited market.

Out of interest, what applications do traders run that require a lot of individual horsepower? I would think all the data is in a database, and the front-ends to the data would be server based. Just wondering.

Regular PCs are already centrally manageable. Check out the systems used in any office with a workstation and minitower on every desk. Centrally managed, upgradeable from a central console, connected to central servers, etc.

we need to add 1GB of RAM to all our Workstation PC's.

Still central are they????

Oh come on, can't anybody see this being used in high security situations? You have just removed all physical access to the machine itself. Not just stopping an ubunto boot on a usb but also stopping it (and all it's parts) from being stolen, and the communication from the keyboard/monitor/mouse to the host is encrypted, and your data is only travelling around in your server room, nobody can snoop your DB connections.

It's obviously not going to replace the desktop PC, but it's a great solution for appropriately minded CEOs, CFOs (and even HR) and security officers, especially as more and more businesses go to wireless.

Geophysist workstations, Trader workstations, Our VP of Secondary marketing (like a trader), IT for monitoring remote data centers, and so on.

Yes, it is a niche product, but not everyone needs the standard cut and dried selection.

My question would not be - is there a demand for a better preforming citrix type application, which brings me to VMWare VDI, but how many of my users would need a machine with this much processing power, and yet not throw a fit when it is not under their desk? If the organization has a security policy in place I can understand a bit, but the last thing I want is to add some yahoo's desktop to my server environment - I do not want to add single user issues to an environment where I am managing issues for the whole company. If a desktop engineer maintains the responsibility for the "desktop in a rack" then I have someone possibly without the requisite experience who now has access to my Data Center.
Also - the Data Center space is the most expensive space in the entire company and now I have to have dedicated space for a bunch of desktops, which were fine on the floor in a cube some time ago? I do not see the logic. I can see the use with a quick glance, but in reality the more thought I put into it, the worse it is. I hope I never have to deal with any of them.

Seems like this is a return to the early days of computing, a server and dumb terminals.

central mainframes and dumb terminal nodes gave way to local processing stations and network chatter which starts to be replaced by centrally managed processing and remote thinclients again..

The pattern even seems to repeat within subgroups as generations of programs drift back and forth between server-side and client-side processing. IT structure even joins the dance between central and decentralized staffing.

In the end, the natural darwinistic evolution of technology marches forward.

If they offered a laptop version of the remote access device I think there would be a fantastic market for it. It would be secure ? stolen or lost your data is secure. Robust ? no hard drive /DVD drive etc so less to get damaged. Longer battery life ? less processing power needed. Less bandwidth needed ? only keyboard input and screen images are transmitted.

A lightweight, portable, secure yet powerful solution. It would make something similar to the MacBook Air actually usuable.

You could build the same solution in house booting from a liveCD also. Have the minimal local boot fire a client connection back to the central server. You could even use rdesktop to connect into a Windows terminal server if you wanted. I don't think you'd need anything more than the networking, X, rdesktop and ssh to do it; probably less since there are already thinkclient builds available.

Can someone explain to me what is the difference between this system, and a windows 2003 application server with 50 thin clients connecting to it through terminal services?

With the latter, Dell doesn't make a dime!

LOL!

so the difference is licensing? is that it? I still don't see what the big deal is.

Your solution is a darned sight cheaper.

If this is indeed a one-to-one solution, then Dell has indeed dropped the ball. Cloud computing is the future and I see more and more large companies taking the desktop out of the office and putting it in the data center. Half of your security problems will be solved.

But if this solution implements desktop virtualization where you can have a one-to-many relationship where one server hosts multiple VMs then Dell is on to something, but if not, there are better solutions out there like ClearCube.

I believe that cloud computing is the future--especially in the consumer space where hardware illiterate people just pay a subscription to use a virtual computer in a data center miles away using RDP. There's no worry about upgrading, hard drives crashing, viruses and back ups. You just use it like your cellphone. For $50 a month, most people would pay for the convinience.

I can see where something like this could be useful for companies who do a lot of high end design work with applications such as AutoCAD, inventor or SolidWorks which have a lot of high end graphics needs or studios like Dreamworks or Pixar for CGI.
I'm the network\systems admin for a manufacturing company that uses high end design software that I mentioned above and we could use a product like this if the video at terminal is as good as if you were connected directly to it

At my company we are already running WYSE terminal thin clients. We have 4 ESX servers (Dell R900's) hooked to EMC Clariion storage. The thin client just RDP's to their VM. No latency or problems whatsoever.

I manage the infrastructure group for an aerospace company. We are currently performing some proof of concepts with the similar product from HP called RGS. Although theirs is in the from of a blade chassis the whole "workstation in the data center" concept still applies. Using the HP solution we can, but are not forced to, use a thin-client at the users end. We see huge potential for these new remote solutions. So far the performance running Catia high-end CAD solutions have been incredible. We are beginning tests to see just how far we can stretch the client end and still achieve acceptable performance across the WAN. All studies thus far indicate that the products can operate very efficiently at latencies of 60ms. We do design and manufacturing work for many large aerospace companies and each has a specific build that changes very rapidly. Having systems in a contralized location would help increase the success rate of reloading these "blockpoints" so often. Not to mention the robustness and security that the data center provides. Many of these OEM's are *VERY* picky about where their data is at and who has access to it. Centralized systems adress this concern nicely.

We're heading this direction, virtualized desktops running virtualized applications. I need to do some testing then setup a proof-of-concept system and dual monitor support is a requirement. I'm looking at NeoWare/HP but would like to hear what others may be using.

Thank you for the specification of products

Regards

SBL - BPO Services