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).

Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has large-scale plans for deploying OpenOffice.org on Windows PCs, a MINDEF spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"MINDEF has already installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 desktop computers," said the spokeswoman. "We hope to deploy OpenOffice on 20,000 desktop computers by the end of March 2006."

MINDEF's deployment to OpenOffice.org is believed to be one of the biggest by any government agency.

The spokewoman said the ministry is not migrating to OpenOffice.org -- instead OpenOffice.org will coexist with Microsoft Office 97 on PCs running Windows XP.

The decision was made to increase user choice and save costs, according to the spokeswoman. "This is part of our plan to create more choices in productivity suites for our users," she said. "With our limited budget, we are always exploring opportunities to maximise the value for every dollar spent."

She said the ministry may switch from Windows XP to Linux in the future, although there are no concrete plans at present. (read more ...)