Dell streams into diskless desktops

Well it worked pretty well in the 1980s... 

I was employed by an organization that had about 40,000 PCs, many were disk-less and used a boot PROM to get an image from the local Netware 2 server. These things were very reliable - So will many IT staff get laid off?

All I can say is that if this is the direction computing is headed, I will not be doing my personal finances with a computer. It's back to the old paper checkbook register and paper tax forms. Oh yeah, and online shopping - I wonder if any of my browsing will be cached on those distant HDs.

This seems like a big privacy problem to me.

Another thing - with the speed (or lack thereof) of internet connections here in the US, I wonder how this will work out in the long run. Local hard drives run pretty darn fast compared to having to transfer the data to some not so distant drive at the awful speeds the average user is limited to.

I don't think the hard drive companies will be to worried. Instead of one hard drive in a pc, there will need to be a couple in a RAID array at the datacenter.

Yeah, agree with Hal, Seagate or other hard disk manufacturers should be very happy about it, they will ship more enterprise grade stuff = more profit

A company will only need, say, a 1TB array, rather than a 500GB array at the server and 50x 100GB HDDs (scale your numbers as appropriate).

And I'll bet that enterprise-grade HDDs don't give nearly as good margins as consumer-grade.

Won't work, except if you live in a cubicle farm. Far from everyone is chained to one location. Here, we have laptops with docking stations, because we frequently have to take our lappys to client sites to support our work.

Granted, there are some companies that could benefit from this, but those companies should have already implemented thin clients, so Dell's announcement isn't really going to amount to much.


so when one downloads the illegal stuff, who's fault is it going to be? the one that downloaded it or the one that stores it? 

privacy is also a big issue with bank and personal info... what about wanting to play video games and the disk activity that it takes to load it?

I just wonder how many diskless PCs they can put in a typical office. You know we are so used to send and receive large attachment emails. Many users would need 10GB+ each to store outlook mail archives. The mail usage continues to grow. I would doubt how cost effective to put all these mail archives on the server, and with good performance. I think the diskless applies to only a few people that don't use email.

I have been using thin clients for years in schools. It works. Saves lots of power, noise, maintenance and failures. Moore's Law permits one server to run hundreds of thin clients for perhaps $40 per seat. Thin clients can be bought new for $140. With GNU/Linux, there are no per-seat licence fees. It is just a better way to go. Did I mention that many thin clients are fanless, low-powered things that last ten years?

1. No, not bad news for drive vendors. If the central storage uses high-end drives, their margins go up by close to an order of magnitude (commodity desktop drives are the worst in that department), even if some overall space consolidation occurs; if it uses desktop drives, they'll likely be mirrored, offsetting much or all of any space consolidation.

2. A diskless client is hardly the logical descendent of a dumb terminal, not even of a 'smart' terminal (which IIRC was Citrix' main focus, back in the day), and barely qualifies as 'thin' at all. Remote storage saves only a modest amount overall (as has been mentioned, the disks gotta be present *somewhere*).

3. What appears to be being described here is also nothing like server-based computing with blades, where the processing is done remotely (that's more like having a smart terminal).

4. Privacy is a non-issue: just encrypt the data before it's sent away, and decrypt it when it returns. The processing power to do so is dirt cheap today (and if you also compress it in the process, it might actually *improve* performance). You'd probably want a remote file server that would allow you to encrypt the entire directory structure, though (names can be revealing).

5. The article talked about remoting the storage to the datacenter, not across the Internet. Fast Ethernet is marginally sufficient for this task, and Gigabit Ethernet provides more bandwidth than a local disk does. Current U.S. 4 Mbit/second Internet download speeds would be a lot harder to live with, but using (again, encrypted) remote Internet storage for backup still could make sense (and such facilities already exist today).

6. Placing email (or for that matter anything, though currently I don't know of non-archive-storage data deduplication products for anything but email) makes it possible to keep only a single (replicated) copy of a large attachment which many people have received): it saves space.

In summation, while I'm not sure that actual 'thin' clients make a great deal of sense, remote storage does in any environment where a LAN is required for other reasons: storage security is far better (not only does a remote file server enforce it independently of the clients, but client malfunctions can only damage data in the files they have accessed rather than potentially hose the entire file system) and so is storage reliability/availability (due to the controlled storage environment, the ease with which centralized redundancy can be managed, and the ease of the centralized backup process).

This is about the stupidest idea Ive ever seen and is likely to end up about as successful as Microcraps online software rental business. 
Only an idiot thinks renting something online that you can download for free is a good idea and only a bigger idiot would agree to allow someone else to store their data for them.
Please fire the idiot manager at Dell that thought this beauty up before the zero computer skills retards running corporate America start thinking its a good idea...because you know thats the intended target.