Virtual disk based centralized management for enterprise networks

Abstract

The rapid advances in hardware, software, and networks have made the management of enterprise network systems an increasingly challenging task. Due to the tight coupling between hardware, software, and data, every one of the hundreds or thousands of PCs that are connected in an enterprise environment has to be administered individually, leading to high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We argue that centralized management with distributed, diskless clients, yet centralized repositories of all software and data can reduce the management complexity with reduced software maintenance time, improved system availability, and enhanced security. We instantiate such paradigm with a diskless, thick client based system that supports heterogeneous OSes including Windows - -the dominant commodity OS in the current market. The prototype requires no or minimum OS modification, nor application modification. Our initial deployment and experiment results demonstrate that our approach is a feasible and efficient solution for managing enterprise network systems. Copyright 2006 ACM.