Guidelines for Choosing System Types

Determining which system types are appropriate for your environment can be done by comparing each 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/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 from a centralized server, quickly and easily 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 Usage

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

Table 3-2 describes how each system type scores in terms of each of these categories. A ranking of 1 is most efficient; a ranking of 4 is least efficient.