Posted on 01/30/2010 11:12:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Throughout the computer industry companies of all sizes, from garage startups to Microsoft, are bracing for the possibility that their future will be in the hands of people like Sean Whetstone.
The head of computer operations for Reed Specialist Recruitment, an employment service with operations on three continents, Whetstone recently upgraded his company's 6,000 desktop computers. Chief information officers order new Dells or HPs all the time. But the computers Whetstone brought in for his employees aren't the traditional metal boxes that sit next to desks or under monitors. They are "virtual" computers. Each employee has a keyboard and a screen, but the processors making the calculations and deciding what color goes in each pixel are far away, inside a big computer at Reed's main data center in London.
In the science fiction staple of virtual reality, people live not in the real world but as ciphers inside a computer somewhere. That's analogous to what happens with the virtual desktops at Reed. To the user, Microsoft Windows looks just as it does coming from a PC. But the electronic desktop doesn't exactly reside on the desk.
Switching to virtualized desktops is often expensive at the outset because the networking software is complicated. But the maintenance costs are a lot lower. When something goes wrong--say, a computer has a software error--Whetstone doesn't need to send someone from tech support out to the employee's desk. Instead, a technician simply logs on to the main computer and tinkers with the program running there. Whetstone expects to save 20%, or $2.4 million a year, off his technology expenses.
Next year will likely be the start of a large upgrade for PCs as big companies switch to Windows 7, Microsoft's latest operating system.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Desktop virtualization, however, threatens to break that pattern. Instead of spending $1,000 for a system with the latest Intel chip and a fast hard drive, a company might get by with a virtualized PC running on a screen, keyboard and network connector costing in all only $150. The corporate customer gets the promise of lower support costs plus the security and simplicity that come from having data in one carefully guarded place.
I am no CS expert but hasn’t this debate been going on for decades since desktops got powerful enough to challenge the speed of mainframes.
How is this different than the "work stations" and mainframes of the 70's?
Forbes also talks about another trend — CLOUD COMPUTING.
In an article entitled : VIRTUALIZATION vs THE CLOUD
When you’re talking about virtual computing, you’re invariably talking about hardware; specifically, making PC-style hardware available to users in a new way. A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before.
Cloud computing, by contrast, usually refers to the sorts of software that run once a computer gets turned on. The “cloud” indicates that the software is hosted in a data center, not sitting on your desktop. If you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office for your word processing or spreadsheets, that’s cloud computing. You can mix and match these two approaches, undertaking cloud computing on a nonvirtual, traditional PC. And the opposite: You can use traditional, Office-style programs on a virtual PC.
Big deal. Years back, when we needed a computer we would get on the old TTY keyboard and our computations would be done at a computer center hundreds of miles away. It’s a little faster nowadays though........
Yup. Back in my day, we didn’t have those fancy schmancy terms like “virtual computer.” Nope, we called ‘em “terminals.”
Cheers
So the cycle continues dumb terminals, smart terminals etc.... Here we go back to 1970’s
Because you have you own private copy of Windows running in a dedicated address space.
The main problem with this is style of work. If the job requires that everyone have a laptop, and travel around to conference rooms and meetings with it, this is not going to work.
On the other hand, not having to lug your laptop home every night is a convenience. You can get to your work desktop from any web browser on the public internet.
We're basically back to that but with more applications and a better GUI.
Wasn’t this going to be called “web-based computing” about ten years ago?
Why didn’t it come off then?
This is exactly what we had in the 60s except our monitors were teletypes and the mainframe was the computer.
The big boys up the will still need to be cut out of authority over some parts of the activities that keep the business in business and safe from the competitors.
Government has an even worse requirement ~ you can't do business with folks if you pass their stuff around willy-nilly. It has to be protected in line with the standards of 15 different statutes, most of which can send a federal employee to prison for many, many years.
Just the latest move to sell CIOs a bunch of hardware. Desktops don’t cost a $1,000 anymore. Most maintenance can already be done remotely for a dollar a seat.
I manage 3 laptops, one at home, one at work and a small netbook. I have a horrible file management problem between them. I’ve toyed with building a server where I could stash/work on or retrieve certain common files. It would have to be internet based. Right now I do it by emailing files or using thumbdrives.
We’re actually backing away from virtual at work. Turns out when you start running two or three hundred machines even through a kick butt virtual center with a killer SAN the thing bogs down viciously. I’m sure we’ll still be using it some, but it no longer appears to be the killer solution we thought it was 2 or 3 years ago.
Well, according to this article, Desktop virtualization is essentially Act II of a tech shift that began earlier in the decade involving the servers that labor behind the scenes, running databases and hosting Web sites.
While crucial to a company’s operations, servers tend to be busy only in spurts, spending much of their time sitting idle. At the start of the decade, when a new breed of software made it possible to make one piece of hardware act as if it were several servers, companies embarked on a wave of server consolidation. This year, estimates are that half of all server based computing will be on virtual machines.
Two of the biggest players in this market are VMWare and Citrix.
VMware is based in Palo Alto, Calif. It grew out of the Stanford University engineering environs that also gave the world Google, Sun and Silicon Graphics. Its market capitalization of $17 billion alongside revenues of only $1.9 billion says something about Wall Street’s expectations for its growth and profit margin.
Citrix Systems in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. had its origins in the world of clerical computing. The company was founded in 1989 by an IBM software veteran and has revenues of $1.6 billion and a $7.2 billion market cap.
The VMware-Citrix contest hasn’t gone on long enough to handicap, though observers note that Citrix has the advantage of a close association with Microsoft, which watched with alarm as VMware grew to prominence in the data centers it wanted to own for itself.
A shift to virtualized desktops would affect everyone in the industry, not just the companies making the software that directly allows it. Every large tech company stands ready with new products, new services, new technology directions, in case it takes off.
At Hewlett-Packard virtualization products were once considered niche offerings handled by a small, dedicated sales crew. Now, all HP sales people have them on their rate cards.
Dell says it takes a slightly different approach, preferring to talk about “flexible computing” for the benefit of customers unwilling to go the full virtualization route.
CISCO sees the interest in desktop virtualization as validation of the emphasis it has been putting on networking.
Right now, while they promise to reduce administrative costs, virtual PCs cost 50% more than regular ones because of the extra software companies need to license in addition to Windows. Gartner estimates that premium will need to be cut in half before virtualization becomes a widespread phenomenon. There is also the issue of performance. It turns out that some of the most trivial uses of computers—watching YouTube videos, for example—are among the hardest to replicate on a virtual computer, since intense graphics need to be transmitted instantly over the network.
Have you checked the prices of PC lately? A computer that runs a basic set of business apps would cost under five hundred (with a monitor), not a thousand. The price for the business apps would not be that much different.
I think the guy is crazy since it provides a single point of failure. The mainframe goes down and hundreds of users are rendered inoperable for the simplest of tasks that don’t normally require a network connection.
Aside from access to the WWW (which didn't exist then) the old TTY Model 40 was capable of doing the same thing (if they had had Windows at the time). Far as I can tell, the only difference is speed.
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