Q: I have 60% free space on 10,000 PCs. Can I consolidate it by mounting it as a volume and using a login script to map it to the desktops?

A: It's not practical to do this, as far as I know. With identical workstations, you're better off with a generic boot image and putting clients' desktop settings and files on a home drive mapped to the server. This is better because:

  1. Backups are consolidated. Home drives reside on protected servers and server storage is efficiently utilized.
  2. Backups don't fail because a user's system is off.
  3. Network performance improves without the traffic of 10,000 backup jobs moving across it.
  4. If a user loses a drive, the standard drive image can be quickly reloaded on a new drive. If users log in on another users' system, they see their own system.
  5. Support goes down.
You can still do this even with a variety of desktops and operating systems in your environment, to a certain degree. You won't have the advantage of a gold standard system's image, but user data will be protected and consolidated on the server. --Joel Lovell, storage networking specialist, Sistina Software

Additional Questions:

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June 2003: Can you describe the steps that a single byte takes when going from memory to a spinning spindle and back again?
May 2003: What trends do you see in open-systems backup and recovery environments?
Apr 2003: What tools can we use to replicate domestic and overseas databases to one another?
Mar 2003: We're building an HSM solution to which we'll write 100GB+/month and store it for seven years. Do you think we should use CD, DVD or tape?
Feb 2003: I want to consolidate 10TB+ of files onto one system. Would you recommend products from EMC, NetApp or one based on Microsoft's SAK?
Jan 2003: I'm out of disk space on my Sun server running Oracle. Is NAS a good choice?
Dec 2002: File server cluster vs. network load balanced vs. DFS: What's the best method for file server HA?
Nov 2002: What are the pros and cons of storing user files on a RAID array with either ATA or SCSI drives?
Oct 2002: Can you do a LAN-free data transfer by giving an IP address to a FC adapter? Does it decrease the speed of data transfers to LAN speeds?
Sep 2002: What is the average amount of hosts for a centralized system to backup at one time?
Aug 2002: Why doesn't my mail client software create a lock for e-mail files if it's reading it off a NAS device?
Which non-EMC NAS devices provide a gateway to connect to an EMC Symmetrix SAN?
July 2002: What does storage pooling mean? What do you think of it?
May 2002: What is the difference between a NAS gateway and a SAN appliance?
Is tape still the best for archiving media files? Does it offer a lower TCO than disk?
Apr 2002: In terms of feed speed, what does that measurement refer to? Is it from the primary storage to the secondary storage? Does it stop at the write speed on the tape drive?
Mar 2002: How can you use solid-state disk (SSD) to accelerate SAN performance?

This was first published in July 2003

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