Brian Madden is reporting that Citrix (famed market leader in Server Based Computing) has announced that they are buying a company called Ardence. Who are Ardence and what do they do? Ardence make a product that allows you to stream an operating system onto desktops or servers. Think about this … you can make a single image of your OS with all your standard software and stream it to client PC’s as required. Need to make a change to the build? Simple … update your image and restream it. There’s also some benifits to server computing.
Obviously, what I’ve just said about desktops can apply to Citrix servers. It’s not an uncommon practice for companies to rebuild Citrix farm servers in rotation. Having a streaming process would make this a doddle.
But hold on. There’s more. You can leverage Ardence to consolidate servers. Have a busy web server during the day that does nothing at night? Great … restream it as a backup server or some batch processing server so you don’t need extra hardware. Maybe you have application silos in your Citrix farm and need to move servers quickly between them to match demand. Streaming the OS makes this easy.
Brian Madden has written some documentation on the solution and I recommend you read it. This is one of those solutions that just makes so much sense that I cannot believe I’ve never seen it deployed.