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To: Tony Viola who wrote (97130)	1/22/2000 5:19:00 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony, (sorry about the long post but you did ask) As the networks (corporate LANs and internet) get faster, we can start running the kind of apps that we want to run but haven't been able to because of network bottlenecks. Location independent computing allows an employee to move around the building and sit at any PC, whilst maintaining their own personal settings. Just like when we use SI, our subjectmarks and unread counts are the same regardless of which computer we use. These settings are stored on a server. Many use Windows NT roaming profiles. This can contain little more than a few shortcuts along with some simple information for each roaming profile aware app and take up perhaps 200k. Or you can be unfortunate enough to work somewhere that uses Lotus Notes and have several megabytes to bring down from the server each session (desktop.dsk, cache.dsk etc). Using Windows 2000 in conjunction with SMS 2, we take the roaming concept to the extreme and are at the point where when you logon, your applications can be installed, saving the licensing costs of having every app on every PC just in case the one user that needs it happens to move around a lot. This is fantastic functionality except who wants to sit and watch their apps get installed on a slow PC when they logon? This alone will drive faster PC's. I remember working at Bankers Trust in London several years ago. When a PC on the trading floor had a problem, there was a mad rush to try to get that PC back up and running with all the necessary applications installed and configured. Manual IP addresses and all. Trading floors these days have spare PC's. The old PC is removed, the new one is up and running within however long it takes to reconnect the cables, boot it up and log it in. The fault in the original system can be dealt with at leisure. In terms of productivity applications, developers will use up whatever capacity is available. This could be from increased functionality to faster development schedules forcing less efficient programming. E.g. you can often write an app more easily in VB than in C++ but the VB app will be bigger and slower. However it is often cheaper just to buy more expensive PC's that can handle the bigger app than suffer from a slow development time. Even with today's applications, better server response times mean larger documents. It may not have been practical to work with a 200MB Excel spreadsheet due to the sheer amount of time it takes to open it based on server/network performance. As servers and networks rise to this challenge, the pressure is on the PC to be able to handle that kind of document with agility. That is good news for Rambus and Intel. Exchange and Lotus Notes offer good functionality. Many customers can't take advantage of that functionality because they can't get the server based data across the LAN within an acceptable response time. Of course, with gig ether and layer 3 switching, the pressure is once again on the PC architecture to deliver. The other areas of growth that this is driving is storage and backup. Hence the lofty valuations of fibre channel related companies. For those that don't want to buy gig ether modules for their switching infrastructure, you can equip each server with a number of Intel based 100Mb cards that are capable of bandwidth aggregation. Five cards can be installed as a team. They all share the same IP address and are connected to their own switch port. Four cards can each serve a different switched connection with the fifth as a backup should one fail. Thus we get 400Mb. This is full duplex so that is 400Mb into the server and 400Mb out. Should two cards fail, the team automatically drops down to 300Mb. Windows Terminal Server could challenge this scenario. WTS is a mainframe like approach to PC apps using thin clients. A CE machine or a Citrix client can have as low a spec as 2MB of RAM and still get reasonable performance. The clients environment is held completely at the server and a very efficient protocol is used to transfer keystrokes and screenshots which is all the client needs to handle. This is very hardware efficient because the server gets economies of scale when several users have the same app. i.e 500 conventional users with 20 MB of MS Word code loaded each has a total RAM requirement for MS Word of 10GB. 500 WTS users with MS Word open share the same code in memory on the server with an incremental amount of memory each for their own particular customisations. Fortunately for the hardware manufacturers, WTS is not trivial to install and configure, I'm not sure what kind of inroads it is making. I do however know that when installed properly it is fantastic.