Virtual Disk based Centralized Management for Enterprise Networks

The rapid advances in hardware, software, and networks have made
the management of enterprise network systems an increasingly challenging
task. Due to the tight coupling between hardware, software,
and data, every one of the hundreds or thousands of PCs that are
connected in an enterprise environment has to be administered individually,
leading to high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We argue
that centralized management with distributed, diskless clients,
yet centralized repositories of all software and data can reduce the
management complexity with reduced software maintenance time,
improved system availability, and enhanced security. We instantiate
such paradigm with a diskless, thick client based system that
supports heterogeneous OSes including Windows—the dominant
commodity OS in the current market. The prototype requires no
or minimum OS modification, nor application modification. Our
initial deployment and experiment results demonstrate that our approach
is a feasible and efficient solution for managing enterprise
network systems.