Submitted by Red Hat will use its annual summit to share its vision of a new paradigm for business PCs, which includes a partnership with Intel Corp. to deploy appliances in a virtual machine to bring enterprise-class management and security to the PC.
Red Hat will use its annual summit to share its vision of a new paradigm for business PCs, which includes a partnership with Intel Corp. to deploy appliances in a virtual machine to bring enterprise-class management and security to the PC.
Beyond the marketing speak, it sounds like Red Hat is going to take the idea of a terminal server and push each session into some sort of virtualized environment that doesn’t rely directly on a specific server. If I’m on the right track, it seems like it would be a good way to buffer the desktops from each other and the server(s) as a whole in terms of direct file access.
Although, you’re still going to be paying through the teeth for shared storage, virtual server hosts, and network gear.
“[…] it sounds like Red Hat is going to take the idea of a terminal server and push each session into some sort of virtualized environment that doesn’t rely directly on a specific server.
If I read this, it reminds me to OS/ES’s TSO and its successors that we run on the EC-1055M in the 80s… so history strikes again. 🙂
“If I’m on the right track, it seems like it would be a good way to buffer the desktops from each other and the server(s) as a whole in terms of direct file access.”
This would minimize the maintenance work that is to be done on the desktops, a very good idea.
From the article’s description:
to bring enterprise-class management and security to the PC
I think this functionality will be limited to PCs used in corporate envoronments, so the home PC market will not be affected. This is because PC users usually don’t care about management (which they tend to leave to somebody else) and security (no care at all).
We’ll see if Red Hat introduces a concrete product. I think it’s goint to be something like the Solaris thin client systems built by Sun (Enterprise server + Ray clients), but wuth full featured PCs as clients… but I’m just guessing here.
That wouldn’t be something like this, would it?
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
Too much marketing bull in the article for my liking, and I have no clue whatsoever what the Intel people in there are talking about.
In general, I like the idea of appliances, but creating them for yourself is usually better. I tend to find that using other peoples’ appliances means that you end up using operating systems or Linux distros you haven’t standardised on, they have their own local databases when you have your own database server, you need to integrate it into your own network and LDAP set up. There’s still quite a bit to do, even to a supposed ‘drop-in’ appliance. You’re better off creating your own base appliances that you can reuse, built for your own purposes.