Thin PC Again? Better Ready the Network

Nice post over at saastainability lead me to an article on Information Age: Virtualising the desktop. I mentioned VMWare in yesterday’s Energy Efficiency in the Data Center post, and had a bit of an update from them at a recent storage event. Life is getting pretty interesting in the space, with Microsoft sticking their oar in too.

The most interesting side of virtualization, from a network perspective, is the area of desktop virtualization - you could get confused reading VMware’s take here and Microsoft’s here. Rather than thinking of multiple OS’s on the desktop, turn it on its head a bit, splash on a bit of Cloud Computing aftershave and voila: A new wave big enough for the major vendors to surf. An opportunity for the birth of the thin PC. Lighter clients, accessing applications running on distant servers. Better fetch our boards…

The Information Age Article features Richard Dawson, Bracknell Forest’s IT services manager, talking about their use of virtualization (he was also in a virtualization story in CIO magazine and Bladewatch back in July).

“I believe we are at a crossroads at the moment in terms of the way we deploy desktops and traditional desktop technology,” he [Dawson] said. “We currently have 1,400 Intel-based machines from Dell, and we have £300,000 set aside to replace 500 of those desktops in the traditional way - taking out 500 old machines and putting in 500 new ones.”

“But, we’re now really questioning whether this is the right way to go. We know we don’t really need to deploy a fat, £600 PC to everyone’s desktop, because nobody uses all of its capabilities. The management of that device is getting more complex and that’s not to mention the power that they use and the CO2 they produce as well.”

The article mentions a final decision hasn’t been made, but you can see the line of thinking. With more and more going into the data center, why not run the desktops from there too? Of course, if your organization has already moved to web-based applications, this point is somewhat moot - you’ve already broken free of power hungry desktops and moved into the land of low power devices.

An obvious impact of moving the desktop off of the desktop (?!?) is going to be greater demands on the network. Of course, Citrix has been treading this path for a while too. Now we have a bit of green and some cloud to push things along, better get those switches and routers ready.