Comments on: Diskless PC possibilities

By: Ted

Ted — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:11:40 +0000

Ted…

This sure as heck beats reading Playboy in the dark wth a flashlight….

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Flash drives as hard-drive replacements

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:13:37 +0000

[...] But to me, the really interesting future here is PCs with removable persistent solid-state storage. I wrote about the subject a year ago, and I just want to take this opportunity to remind people that’s it’s a desirable and not-implausible way for personal computing and consumer electronics to evolve. If the storage part of the system can be separated out, what you’re left with is mainly the human-facing I/O and the processing power to drive that. So from where I sit, portable external storage could drive an explosion in interesting and useful electronic device form factors. • • • [...]

By: jack

jack — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:37:05 +0000

Mmm…. what the definition os a disk? By using the current technology, disk is
a media to store data. In other words, rotating/managtic disk or usb storage
are all called “disk”, I think in the near feature, small size/high capacity storage
will be popular and cheap. We think the discuss should focus on the next generation
of the computing! we stongly think “a diskless pc” is the next star of the IT
industry. The computing model can be divided into 3 eras. The first eva was
between 1960-1980, the central management and central computing archtitecture,
all the managenment and computing power are on the server, called mainframe. The
second era is the pc era. Distributed computing and distributed managment.
becuase pc becomes so cheap quickly more than the HUGE company thought. so DEC
was dead soon after the PC grows. What is the next generation computing model,
it should has the local computing power but having the central managemnet mechanism.
This diskless pc is the solution. Think! we just buy a pc without any storage,
just plug the network line into socket in your home, all the operating system and
software bring to you within minutes, like the TV. We are making the solution component
now. we think we can change the world. the third era of computing revolution is coming
and all the data and reports believe it will come in 2007.
For the enterpise, imaging that, if your pc is broken, just replace a new one.
and turn on the pc, your familar os and app still on there, how to achieve it ?
diskless pc, we already achieve it. but now we invest all our resource to make it
boot from wan….,

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » The laptop security nightmare

The Monash Report»Blog Archive » The laptop security nightmare — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 06:33:24 +0000

[...] Yes, I’m repeating myself. • • • [...]

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Path to the diskless PC?

The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Path to the diskless PC? — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 07:28:05 +0000

[...] Jimmy Daniels of RealTechNews writes about Robson Flash Cache technology, as an add-on to conventional PCs. But at the bottom he gets to what I think the core point, which is that it would be better to use flash to replace hard drives altogether. [...]

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:46:14 +0000

Jack — if there isn’t magnetic storage spinning around really fast, I’m content to call it “diskless.” The real point is that USB storage is in a form factor that is physically very portable, whereas disks aren’t.

The challenge is to also make the storage logically portable …

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:43:40 +0000

VV — you are correct that I was glossing over issues of hardware compatibility.

On the other hand, the whole idea only works if hardware “shells” are built expecting plug-and-play flash drives. So rigorous adherence to (possibly new) API/driver standards could be reasonably demanded as a design requirement.

CAM

By: Jack Hsu

Jack Hsu — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 10:00:12 +0000

I think if we still use the usb as the boot device, the pc can not be called
diskless pc, actually, it still has a disk, but just smaller, data or operating
system still on there.
A diskless pc should really has no any storage on it, no disk, no flash, no usb
device. How to boot it? Network! if we can just boot the pc from the network, all
the management and software are from the other side of the network, the marketing
of a diskless pc will come.
What technology to make a diskess pc to boot from network? as my knowledge, three
successfully products are out to support boot from network. We already sell one
of them for one year. The technology uses the pxe and iscsi technogoy, to boot a
pc via onboard PXE bootrom, the booting code initiates a iSCSI initiator by software
to mapping a remote hard disk to local computer, then what as usuall, the OSs
are booting, we now can boot windows 2000/xp/2003 and linux. The drawback of our product
now is only supported under LAN.

I saw a product last week, a company designed a card combining the iscsi and lan
card, namely, by equiping such interface card, a pc will boot from network.
We also trigger by such product, so we now are developing some kind of bootrom
code to integrate iscsi initiator and tcp/ip stack into the bootrom, therefore,
we can achieve booting a pc from WAN.

By: N.B. Weersing

N.B. Weersing — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:10:02 +0000

From the viewpoint of a systems administrator concerned about simplifying support to users and about compliance with company policies (re: software licensing, data integrity, “safe web-surfing”, etc.), I find many attractive points in the design of a diskless PC that boots from a flash-RAM-stick.
After deploying such a computing platform throughout a user group, the IS department could enforce company policies that now are often ignored or consciously abused. The company’s standard software build could signal the firewall that only web-sites on an approved list are to be accessed. It could also be configured to prevent the addition of personally owned or downloaded software.

Calls to the Help Desk for help with software issues could be resolved simply by replacing or refreshing the standard flash-RAM-stick and copying down the configuration files, peculiar to that user, from a central archive.

I can’t swallow the argument made above that only MS Word can be used to open & update a *.DOC file ( & by inference, that only MS Excel can maintain *.XLW & *.XLS files.) For over five years I’ve been using Star Office (on NT, Linux, OS/2 or SunOS), to update files that I download at home from my office server. (On some machines at home, that suite has been replaced by Open Office.) Under UNIX/Linux, I have several programs that are very adequate for processing image files, whether the format may be JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc.

As to dependence on the combination of hardware and the OS, only those programs written in Java, perl, PHP, Python or some other truly portable script, can be readily moved from one platform to another. I feel lucky to have all versions of Star Office 5.1, (for four diverse platforms), fit on a single CD. With subsequent releases, I think a DVD is required, in order to keep the same degree of compact consolidation and portability. With SW bloat having been blessed by Microsoft, I feel that the mindset of competing developers has too often shifted towards more tolerance for redundant or superfluous code. We are very lucky to have the examples of cell ‘phone and PDA software developers to remind us about more sparse, yet effective alternatives.

[I was saddened to see GeoWorks software manoeuvered out of the PC market by MS machinations, in the early '90's, and then delighted to see its rebirth in the PDA arena, as "Palm OS". Why was this example of abusive monopoly practice not brought up in the anti-trust trial ? To get DR DOS or OS/2 or GeoWorks to co-habit effectively with MS Windows 3.1, I had to clobber krnl386 under Windows. There's a clear example of deliberately predatory software.]

Thank you for your thought-provoking column.
— nbw

By: VV

VV — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 23:02:18 +0000

Very interesting but, obviously, you do not mention some important things:
To be useful, data must generally be processed by specific applications (for instance .DOC files are to be processed by MS Word, .JPG files are to be processed by a jpeg capable application, especially if you want to modify said files).
So, you should not only carry your data with you but also the applications to process them. And these applications must usually be installed into an OS and then they are linked somewhat to the OS. Thus you would need to carry with you: your data, the applications to process them and the OS in which said applications are installed.
But modern OSes are usually linked to the hardware and, even if the box you use is called a “PC Compatible” computer, this compatility refers to basic (and rather old) “standards”.
Nowadays, you cannot natively take an existing HDD running Windows XP, move it to another hardware than the one it was installed on and boot this other hardware. If you do so, you will certainly experiment BSoD (Blue Screens of Death). Linux is more permissive but you can’t be sure that a Linux OS installed on some specific hardware will be able to operate all the components of another hardware platform (especially network cards, graphic adapters, hard disk controllers…)

Some interesting technologies already exist in order to make an existing installed OS compatible with several hardware.
Neoware for instance uses a technology named “UbiBoot”, that was developed by Qualystem (Neoware acquired Qualystem in 2005). UbiBoot can make an OS installed for a specific hardware platform compatible with another hardware platform, but a detection phase has to be performed before the new hardware platform can actually be operated by the pre-existing OS (installed on the previous HW platform), and sometimes you have to manually adjust things on the existing OS in order to make it able to boot on the second platform.
The detection phase often requires the user to provide the drivers for the hardware that has just been detected. And this may not be very convenient to the non-technical user (and even the technical user would have to make sure the needed drivers are available, on CDs, flash disks, floppies etc…)

Neoware uses UbiBoot in conjunction with its Image Manager software suite which, like Ardence product mentioned in an earlier comment, can stream OS, apps and user data to diskless PCs, over a network link.

But obvioulsy, UbiBoot technology could be used in order to make a 1GB or 2GB flash disk containing OS, apps and data compatible with any kind of PC. Yet the drivers hassle would still exist in many cases. And MS would need to support boot over USB (they have taken late initiatives towards this technology:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx
Interesting to note that MS does not mention that their USB drivers stack cannot completely be loaded and initialized in early boot phase. Otherwise, boot over USB would be possible in Windows 2K/XP, as it is under DOS – with appropriate BIOS/int13h support for USBtoIDE- and in Linux)

Another way to go would be to have hardware platforms that would be 100% compatible or standardized (remember the first IBM PCs and “compatible”?). But this would only be possible if the user accepted lower performances because standards are limitating factors when performances improvements are concerned…

In my opinion, the autonomous devices will still be the preferred
way for personnal computing for the next decade. The user will still use PDAs, Laptops, Desktops, and also ThinClients and diskless PCs with shared virtual HDD. Of course, the users will have their data (some of them) on USB keys (backups maybe…)

One day, maybe, we will only carry our data with us and most of the devices we will be able to use will be able to open our files. And my shoulder will be happy not to have to carry a case with my laptop, various power supplies, a mic and headphones, two set of CDs, various cables etc.