OS streaming

Christian Black: Hi, I'm Christian Black with Intel IT. Over the last couple of years, I've been working with virtual relation technologies, and today I'd like to talk to you about one of those technologies we call OS Streaming or operating system streaming.

Anybody who's worked in the PC industry, either corporate or private for the last few years knows the pain of a failed hard drive. This particular user stayed up all night long in the office finishing a PowerPoint presentation, saved their last document after the backup had run and comes in the next morning to a failed hard disk. This makes this user really unhappy, causes a lot of dissatisfaction, a lot of frustration, a lot of time on the PC tech's part, and of course, they lost the data for that meeting in the morning which was really what was most important.

There's a better way to do this, and that better way is operating system streaming. So, what is that? Operating system streaming is where we take an image of the local PC and we pull that out and put it in the server. Once it gets there we call it a V Disk or virtual disk, and that V Disk is subsequently rebroadcast across the local network to multiple clients.

So, you are looking at this, saying, well hey, that can't be that efficient. Actually, it has many benefits. The benefits of virtualization are centralized management of images and patching, faster boot times, more responsive applications for the client, and longer desktop PC life. In benchmarking, virtual disks against a local set of hard drives, we actually found that with very few exceptions, the benchmarks scored higher on the V disk across the network than it did with the local disk itself.

So, all these benefits plus it's faster, it's a no brainier.

If you would like to know more about OS streaming, visit the Intel Premier IT professional website and check out the white papers.