no harddisks

The are most likely using Terminal Server or Citrix Metaframe Presentation server to accomplish this. While there is a network impact, it does offer reduced administration and security costs.
It also offers the ability for an organization to remotely host business continuity in the event of a localized disaster.

Bfilmfan has it. Terminal services for windows based networks. The clients are "dumb" terminals. In the early days of networking, many a large company used this method. The results were huge server farms and huge DB server farms. the biggest drawback was that if all the server nodes ever went down, nobody could do any work. But then back then, a lot of work was still paper based.

Graphics are real killers to networks such as these and often anything graphical is disabled. Usually its limited to people who don't use top-end graphical tools.

The networking devices are just so cheap that its possible to install very good networking right down to the workstation points.

As for the other applications, we used to have different servers for different functions (one for the database, one for the middle-tier server, one for the file system, etc).

Having localised servers meant that we could easily add additional connections to boost the bandwidth between servers.

And with a remote server system such as terminal services or citrix, the bandwidth between application servers and the remote server can be easily increased. Hence, it wouldn't kill the network unless of course the remote services server was crap or there are a lot of graphics or users.

Probably they are using Citrix. My brother's company (about 3000 employees at his location) run pure Citrix and even with graphics (the gui) the performance is incredible. I don't have an actual quote to list but the compression of Citrix is some serious stuff.

Funny actually. No help but just a funny reminder from a while back/

I quoted a computer price for about a year ago. and the client said "My God, I can get one from Future Shop (owned by Best Buy)with a faster processor for less than that!" (An IBM intellistation business machine with 5 year onsite warranty, uuuuuh yeah.:D )

He went to an auction and bought three new PC's for his home business and then made point of sending me an email to show me how much cheaper he could get things than I could, and implied I had intended to rip him off (ZERO $$ markup from ME, straight from MY supplier with no courier costs from Toronto).

I didn't reply to his email, but got a big smile the next day whent he asked how much I would charge to install 3 hard drives and 3 CDRoms. He'd bought dummy's! Aptly named!

He said he knew that when he bought them, sure, and that he'd intended to use me to get the extra parts. So after replacing ONE processor, one motherboard (dead nic) and one power supply, then adding new drives, updating the BIOS and drivers he ended up spending MORE in the long run than if he'd have gone my route to begin with. Not to mention, he has NO warranty and could have had 5yrs onsite.

Sorry to detract from your issue, I just thought it funny to read a classic story about security with dummies. They will also often remove CDROMS from them too, now that's a company I want to work with, one that doesn't trust anyone!

as I am quickly fiding out myself, thin clients, running Citrix. If you have more then say 30 users, then you would need multiple boxes, but, load balancing is nice also. We run our remore users through Citrix architecture now, for 20 users, soon to be 30, from one server. Easier to maintain as well.

Good Grief! I thought we got away from that 20 years ago. P.T Barnum was right there's a sucker born every minute.

As another has said it is called dumb terminals. Went out before Pet Rocks. When the NAS boot box goes down, everyone sits and twiddles their thumbs. Can't even play solitare.

No remote booting is not fine. Every box on the system is chattering to momma. Do you have any idea how much is going on in the background during the operation of a pc.

Base operating system and programs on the PC. Data stored on the servers. No floppies on the machines.

Simple password protection is on the way out. Random generated sync'ed keys, (they change every minute), either manually entered or through usb fobs are what's hot now. Fingerprint reading is running rignt behind.

Usually networks are not secure because people are lazy, or cheap, or they try to lock it down themself and just don't know how.

I'm down off my soap box now.

Lee