so, the new thing that’s been making the rounds lately is the idea of a blade-based PC enviroment. basically, what you have is a blade server sitting in your computer room, and these little terminal-type boxes that sit on the client’s desks and contain the hookups for the monitor/etc. it’s a new spin on an old idea: most recently, using something like a SunRay device or a Windows-based terminal, which themselves aren’t too much different from just deploying old-style X terminals or green-screen dumb terminals (to grossly oversimplify the situation) in your organization. the spin, however, is that each one of your terminals has its own PC behind it. (or, at least that’s how it seems - ClearCube’s website doesn’t seem to state whether or not their solution allows you to aggregate your blades together and carve out slices from the whole for your users. that’d be a big thing, IMHO - given the option of building a new server room to handle several racks worth of blades to service my, for example, 2,000 user organization, I think I’d opt for client desktops.)
I’m personally not seeing the point. I do agree that you’ll reduce certain kinds of support costs if you move to this setup - you won’t have to visit the client every time a hard drive dies or they need more RAM or whathaveyou, since you can just pull the blade out of the rack to do that. however, you’ll have to hit the client to see what the terminal is doing when the management software can’t contact it. (my bet on that is it’d be almost a wash, with the terminals coming out a bit ahead.) I don’t quite see how this makes your management much easier. with technologies like Microsoft’s Active Directory, you can apply policy to the machines that are fairly strict anyway. (it’s even fairly simple, albeit a bit tedious, under Server 2003.) furthermore, with stuff like Dell’s OpenManage, HP OpenView, and the various other products that are available to do this kind of thing, you can query status on the physical hardware and modify PC-level stuff remotely as well. (Dell OpenManage can let you configure the BIOS remotely, etc. etc. etc. I’m not too sure about what OpenView can do, though, since it’s a huge product and I haven’t worked with it at all.) still, unless the computer is completely and totally locked up, you can do most of this stuff remotely or with just a call to the client to say “hey, hold down that power button for about 10 seconds”. I’m furthermore interested in how you get increased uptime with a blade-based system. this is purely anecdotal, but I can’t remember the last time I had to RMA a part on my business desktop - or any of the ones in my immediate area, and I can only remember once or twice having to RMA a system-critical part on a desktop. what I do see fairly often, though, is people loading their machines down with enough adware and spyware that their machine essentially “breaks”, and I don’t see how a blade enviroment will fix this.
so, basically, what I’m getting at is that I don’t quite see the advantages of running a blade PC enviroment. feedback appreciated.
in other news, I recently attended a pretty high-level Windows Server 2003 training course and left it actually being impressed with a Microsoft product (and, believe me, that doesn’t happen very often). it also makes the Apple fanboi in me sad, since they don’t have anything near what MS has in Active Directory. but I do love how I sat down the other day and spend five minutes installing RIS on a really crappy server and then having it ready to image machines with Windows XP SP2. that was cool.