The Vanishing Desktop

BonThomme writes: "/.'s post on Mobility is missing the cool story. The real news is a company called 2cComputing that has licensed SplitBridge and LongView technology from Mobility and Avocent (formerly Cybex + Apex) respectively to create this. Their C-Link product will run at 1.3 Gbps over Cat5, bridging up to 100 meters between the CPU chassis and the Cstation which houses a bunch of USB ports and connections for I/O devices on the user's desktop. Meaning, all the CPU's are co-located for admin via KVM, and are much cheaper to wire together for gEthernet or FibreChannel. Best of all, you don't have to pull cable through the whole building (again)."

Comments

what a kludge

[jetson123]

The continued reliance of PC hardware on those outdated technologies for booting and installation then entails thousands of dollars in KVM switches. And operating systems like Windows NT compound the problem by not being easily remotely accessible.

Also, if you can run the bus over hundreds of feet of CAT 5 networks, that suggests that the bus is probably not running as fast as it should.

Save some money and get hardware and software that are designed for remote accessibility.

Not just X server, or KVM

[scott@b]

This looks like yet another "serial backplane" technology. It's not just the slow I/O on long cables, or an X-server (which still takes smarts at the user interface end). Chop the buss into two sections. One is CPU, RAM, and dsik I/O; the other is the PCI slots including the normal slow I/O (serial, parallel, USB) and the video card.

Now stick fast parallelserial converters on the chopped ends of the buss, run the serial throug LVDM drivers. In the case of C-Link they may be doing a multi-level modulation scheme to get several bits into every symbol (bits vs. bauds, right?)

So the PC with its disks and RAM sits in a locked up, air conditioned room where the cleaning crew can't bang into it, and the just-fired employee can't give it a swift kick.

On the desktop is the other end of the buss, a box with PCI slots and the standard PCI-interfacing I/O chips for slow I/O. No smarts, just the serialparallel converts and a PCI interface plus whatever cards you stick into the local backplane.

Do a little math : take the width of the PCI buss in total signals - data+address+some handshaking - and divide that into the 1.3 Gbps of the serial interface. That's the distant PCI buss speed in buss cycle per second. Now, the CPU, RAM, and disk are all on the standard full tilt buss so they run fast; keyboards and mice and serial ports aren't going to notice the reduced buss speed, it's just the video that might suffer.

Great, a new excuse to take a break!

[Andy_R]

My computer's just asked for a different floppy, I'll be back in about 10 minutes...

We have used the Cybex Extenders

[theinfobox]

We use the Cybex Extenders which is basically the same thing as this. The advantage for use is that it clears up some needed room for us. We have an office in which there are 5 people working together(stock market traders). Becuase of their type of work, they have 3 PCs each. As you can imagine that would make their workspace quite crowded. It also generates a lot of heat. We use the Extenders to loacate their PCs in a nearby closet. This provides better security and the closet has a seprate A/C duct. It is also a lot quieter. Now, this only works because these users don't need floppies, CD-ROMs, etc. They have been reliable so far. Just plug them in and forget them.

Will it solve everyone's problems... No. Not IT product ever does. But this is useful in certain situations. I even took a set home. I used to be jealous of the quiet iMacs. Well now, I have the ultimate quiet computer. I put my PC in the garage, and used the Extender to connect my bedroom. Now my wife doesn't care if the PC is left on all night.

Another problem though is the cost. The last time I checked, the Extenders were about $400. I wouldn't buy them myself at that price... but spending company money, I didn't mind. :)

Remote devices

[billybob2001]

Please (for Windows users) provide a remote reset button.

IT Managers and Users together

[anticypher]

I don't know about you, but the goals of IT managers and (l)users seldom are the same. This is just a press release for a company that has discovered X windows, or a M$ equivalent, and is using existing cat 5 cable at high speeds.

It harkens back to the days of putting all the mainframes in a single room, and allowing the lusers access to only terminals.

And I'm wondering if they are doing 1Gbps over a single 4 wire cat5 installation, or does this require a pair of cat5 cables to achieve 1Gbps, which is what all the other GigE implementations use?

the AC