Hacker News Reader

Comment by odonnellryan | Hacker News Reader

I work for an IT company, and this is very cool. Especially if they make good strides in backups and management (application deployment, etc..).

Much better than buying $100K of hardware for a Terminal Server, and paying $100K of support a year to maintain it ;)

View on HN

Nobody spends $100K / yr on "a Terminal Server", either for hardware, software licensing, or support. If you are then you're not going to manage this "solution" any better, or you're going to be at a scale where Amazon's offering will be leaps and bounds more expensive.

Well okay, it's not just a terminal server. But the purpose is for several dozens of users to connect with their "think clients."

It's a virtual host that has a terminal server + a few other servers.

But what about the bandwidth costs to support a large number of users. I have to imagine that adds up quickly.

It adds up, but not so quickly.

RDP is "smart." The bandwidth requirements can vary from a few KBPS to ~100.

What ends up happening is, if you need more bandwidth in this scenario you're going to need it in general - for downloading files, emails, etc..

Email, usually, takes about the same bandwidth. So, if Amazon is taking that burden, you should be OK.

And people will download the emails, files to the Amazon box using amazons fast connection. It may actually reduce peak bandwidth use.

The experience is laggy, as the top reply suggests. Your users which aren't doing much[should they even have their own box anyway? (No)] won't notice, but people who actually use the box[I was a quant in a former life] will hate you for it.

Dual monitors are also somewhat common nowadays[vital for actual productivity], how the heck is that gonna do over Comcast lines?

When the day comes[never] that we have ubiquitous/cheap bandwith, this idea is nearly practical. Until then it is DOA for "real work".

Even with ubiquitous/cheap bandwidth latency is still an issue (until we get Tachyon Display Port) in any real world scenario.

This might serve a subset well enough but got would it be painful (as you correctly observe) for anything who is hammering the machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com