The pendulum finally swings back - we are finally at the tail end of the PC era. Whilst there were many good things about Personal Computers, the idiom has reached the end of the road at least as far as corporate computing is concerned. What makes Personal Computers great for a single end user also makes it a nightmare for the IT support team in corporates of all sizes and across all industries.

The chief difference between a mainframe and a PC is something called 'virtualization'. For decades, mainframes have offered the ability to have one machine do the job of multiple computers. Mainframes are more efficient and sport utilization rates of more than 80%. PC-based servers, on the other hand, generally have utilization rates between 5 and 15%.  In today's green office, that's just plain unacceptable.  The sprawl of desktops and servers have resulted in most offices running computers that draw as much as 250W per employee, with the computers doing close to nothing most of the time.

What the good folks at Lightspeed Technologies have done in this area is to virtualise not only typical server loads like transactional databases and mailservers, but the actual end user desktops.  These virtual desktops then run on stripped down diskless workstations that run on as little as 7 Watts, and cost as little as US$50 apiece, but deliver the performance of a mid-range PC - more than sufficient to have your deskbound office staff working at top speed whilst leaving you head room to grow your business without the concomitant cost of provisioning a new PC for each new employee (or even worse, a new laptop).