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December 15, 2003
Replace your enterprise desktop with a blade in the data center?
Heard an interesting idea today. What if you could consolidate desktop PCs in the enterprise into the data center? Leave just the monitor, keyboard, mouse and any USB devices on the desktop. Would you be able to achieve similar benefits that server consolidation efforts have achieved? The idea is that you may be able to actually buy fewer blades than you have PC desktops today because you can model usage patterns and do some smart resource sharing. When you layer on shared storage to a SAN or something the benefits could be greater.
HP announced a product last week in this area. They have a new "thin client" on the desktop which is basically embedded XP on a bare bones box with no local storage or processing, just I/O. Then there is XP on the blade. Microsoft must love this because now they get TWO Windows licenses per desktop! HP basically uses Microsoft Terminal Server 2003. Lots of links on that below.
I am not sure the increasing the OS licensing revenue is the right way to go here. The software revenue is already too large of a percentage of the desktop and growing (as hardware shrinks). And what happens to laptops? The percentage of laptops vs desktops in corporate America is growing. Your next desktop is probably a laptop. In many ways, this is a step backward to centralized computing and dumb terminals. With the Terminal Server solution, I am sure there are latency issues over typical Ethernet. How much of a network upgrade is required? Add that cost in. I am sure some companies will pop up that hope to do a better job of latency and functionality in such a super thin client space, but I don't know if it is a good place as a VC to invest. I personally haven't used a desktop in over 7 years. Laptops rule...
Clearcube Web Site:
www.clearcube.com
HP Announcement:
http://comment.cio.com/techtact/techtact_120803.html
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,87786,00.html
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=46454
TECH BRIEFS
H-P to Sell Computer 'Blades'
Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to announce it will sell thin, stackable personal-computer "blades" as part of an effort to reduce corporate computing costs and better compete against Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. Blades are an important part of the computer-server market, but H-P is the first major computer maker to offer PC blades as well. H-P said a computer user would have only a keyboard, monitor and mouse at a desk, along with a small access device to connect with the PC itself, which would be stored remotely. The complete set-up is expected to cost about $1,500, or about the same as a traditional PC. But special software would allow the PCs to be assigned to users as needed, reducing the total number of PCs needed. H-P, Palo Alto, Calif., estimated the three-year cost of managing a blade PC to be about half the cost of managing a traditional PC.
--The Wall Street Journal
Posted by Martin at December 15, 2003 8:38 PM
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