Cloud·316 discussions

Booting from clouded OS – a dream or possibility

Locked

Tags: Cloud

Imagine if a thin client PC has its OS hosted on cloud and can boot from a remote host. In this way similar to a PXE boot, not only users can save installation time/storage on the front ends but the OS can also be standardized/shareable/available anywhere, and have back-end OS updates without demanding CPU time on the client PCs. All needed is just simply a high speed internet link to the cloud OS host system. With such centralized infrastructure, user profiles, apps and data files can naturally become ubiquitously usable from the cloud too for roaming around. Till now, this advanced cloud model seems futuristic but may sooner or later be realized/required with next generation of broadband speed, PC BIOS redesign and higher work-end mobilization needs.

Topic

So what you want is something like Chrome OS built into the BIOS

In reply to Booting from clouded OS – a dream or possibility

To open some sort of connection to a Cloud Service and have the VDU as a display right?

Well I suppose it’s possible but you would want a fast Internet connection and lots of Bandwidth and the unit would be useless without a active Internet Connection. As things currently stand people complain about their Chrome Books being useless when they are connected tot eh Net but they don’t bother to even turn them on when they do not have a Net Connection. You want to make the system more Dependant on the Cloud and not have any storage at the keyboard right?

Besides the most obvious of Who is going to Pay for the Net Connection and the Cloud Service I suppose you could bundle them but most often they are separate costs and you pay 2 different companies for these 2 services. As the system would need to get all of it’s display data from the cloud there would be a enormous amount of Data Transfer involved the the Net Connection is going to be expensive because you are using so much of it just to draw an image on the screen before you even start to enter data. While a Cable connection could support the amount of data transfer I’m not sure that anything slower could and most defiantly a Radio Link as things stand are way too slow to provide the required Data. Remember that all computers have a GPU of some sort [b]Graphic Processing Unit[/b] and generally speaking this is a Dedicated piece of Hardware to provide smooth jitter free graphics. Even the systems that use the CPU to generate Video use a large amount of CPU Time and don’t have very good video.

But the real problem is supplying the hardware at the user end with he Video Data fast enough. So yes it’s possible but at the moment pointless.

Also I’ll not make any mention of the recent Sony and Microsoft Cloud Outages over the past few days as things like that would kill devices like the one you are proposing stone dead very quickly.

Not For a Long Time

In reply to Booting from clouded OS – a dream or possibility

The basic problem is that fast, low latency internet connections and not available to a lot of people. Even in the US, there are large numbers of people and many places where you can’t get the speed and latency for any amount of money.

And I don’t see much action towards resolving that.

Corporate network

In reply to Booting from clouded OS – a dream or possibility

I service a client that has all their machines set up to look for a USB key and that identifies that user and fetches the appropriate OS and programs. It can be used on any machine in the network. The network doesn’t have internet access so it remains safe from intrusion. I have one issued to me that allows full access for service use. If I use my system, it appears to be a simple 128MB chip but nothing can be found. This leads me to think that it must be a BIOS key as the units will not display anything without the proper USB. This is a huge campus network with up to 25,000 machines in 22 different buildings.

[Author]

Replies