Guidelines for Choosing System Types

You can determine which system types are appropriate for your environment by comparing each system type based on the following characteristics:

• Centralized administration

• Can the system be treated as a field-replaceable unit (FRU)?

  This means that a broken system can be quickly replaced with a new system without any lengthy backup and restore operations and no loss of system data.

• Does the system need to be backed up?

  Large costs in terms of time and resources can be associated with backing up a large number of desktop systems.

• Can the system's data be modified from a central server?

• Can the system be installed quickly and easily from a centralized server without handling the client system's hardware?

• Performance

• Does this configuration perform well in desktop usage?

• Does the addition of systems on a network affect the performance of other systems already on the network?

Disk space usage

How much disk space is required to effectively deploy this configuration?

This table describes how each system type scores in terms of each characteristic. A ranking of 1 is most efficient. A ranking of 4 is least efficient.