The Internet Café or ICafé business is one of the lucrative industries in town. The World Wide Web has become a part of the people’s daily lives all over the world as it provides fast communications whether for personal or for business interaction, convenient online shopping, business product promotion and undertakings, research and information for students’ homework and for entertainment as well. Most ICafé owners take advantage of using diskless workstations to reduce the overall cost of its local area network.
Diskless workstations is a system that uses network booting to load the operating system wherein computer units on a LAN (local area network) do not contain its own hard disk and other boot devices like floppy drives or CD/DVD-ROMs but contains common components like CPU, RAM, video, sound and network adapter. The machine boots and store files on a network file server.
The main server called the master pc contains one large capacity disk drive to provide the diskless machines enough storage space as a local hard disk would, the diskless units are most commonly called as the slave machines.
Advantages of diskless nodes are as follows:
Lower production cost on LAN. Having one big capacity hard disk drive is cheaper than having several low capacity drives.
With one or two main file server, depending on the number of slave machines, back-ups and security can get more simplified.
The diskless system has a greater advantage on software manageability. Software installation, backups, anti-virus and game updates are centrally managed in the main server.
It provides reduced running costs and a quieter operation.
Data processing and accessibility is faster from a large remote file server than accessing it manually from several small local storage devices.
Disadvantage of Diskless workstations:
All pc units are of no use if the network fails.
Photo credits: computer-no-harddisk.blogspot.com
