Dell boots disks and fires up streamed PCs
Thin clients and blades are for the weak — Forget thin clients and blade PCs. Dell will do the virtual desktop thing in its own, less than radical way. — Dell today announced a streamed desktop package that will allow customers to manage up to 100 PCs from a single server.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dell's streamed-desktop push lands after a rough summer for its box business: August 2007 brought confirmed reports of flaming laptop batteries and XPS M1330 units shipping late or missing operating systems, even as the company courted professionals with the Precision M6300 workstation. The new package — up to 100 PCs managed from a single server — leans into the enterprise side, where server pull-through and management software matter more than retail unit volume.
Architecturally, Dell is taking a contrarian position in the virtual-desktop debate: instead of replacing desktops with thin clients or blade PCs, it keeps standard PCs in place and streams their images from a data-center server, betting familiarity beats terminal hardware.
First-order effects
- IT departments gain a way to manage up to 100 standard PCs from one server, centralizing image control without swapping desktops for thin-client terminals.
- Thin-client and blade-PC vendors take a direct hit to their sales pitch, as Dell argues full PCs served from a data center make dedicated desktop terminals unnecessary.
Second-order effects
- Each 100-seat streamed deployment pulls through additional Dell server and software revenue, shifting the company's mix away from standalone desktop boxes.
- Desktop-virtualization rivals face pressure to match a package that leaves existing PCs untouched, since Dell's approach removes the forced hardware-refresh cost that terminal-based schemes carry.
Third-order effects
- If streamed images become the default enterprise model, the desktop shrinks into a peripheral of the data center and vendor competition migrates to whoever controls the server-side stack.
- Centralized image management would decouple enterprise desktop lifecycles from individual hardware upgrades, weakening the unit-volume economics that have long anchored PC makers' business.
The trend: Enterprise desktops are drifting from locally-managed PCs toward centrally-streamed images, pulling PC vendors like Dell toward server-anchored business models.