From the Editors: Reinventing the Enterprise Desktop

By Systems Management News Team

September 15, 2008 —  Look around your office. The Windows-based desktop and notebook computers that your employees use haven’t changed much in a decade. Sure, they’re faster, have a lot more memory and have bigger hard disks. Of course, they mainly have sleek LCD panel displays instead of clunky CRTs. However, those Windows XP and Windows Vista boxes are still 32-bit machines running the same sort of applications they ran under Windows 98. Beyond Wi-Fi and faster Ethernet, their support issues are largely the same, too.

That’s going to change sooner than you think, driven by two factors: 64-bit Windows and new initiatives that will drive multithreaded software.

While Microsoft has offered 64-bit versions of Windows for several years, most consumers and enterprise users continue to run the 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. The 64-bit capabilities in modern Intel and AMD processors have sat dormant.

That’s changing. According to Microsoft, consumer pre-installs of 64-bit Windows Vista are exploding. The enterprise desktop may be on a similar track. That may mean a learning curve for your support team, as well as an exciting period with device drivers, registry issues and so on.

Next stop will be new multithreaded applications, both those being built in-house and upgraded versions of commercial software. Thanks to new tools from Intel and Microsoft, as well as new generations of multicore processors, developers will find it both easier and more compelling to write multithreaded code. That will push demand for end-user machines with two- or four-core processors. While that shouldn’t affect support too much, there is bound to be some impact.

After 10 years (or more) of static 32-bit desktops and notebooks, this will be a welcome change.

Reinventing Systems Management News
The next issue of Systems Management News won’t look like this issue. Since our launch in April, we’ve listened, we’ve learned and we’re making some changes.

For one thing, the magazine will look different. It’ll look more like a magazine and less like a newspaper. The new, smaller format will suit our new publication frequency: once monthly instead of twice per month. We’re also shifting our printed stories to be less tied to industry news. Instead, we’ll publish in-depth articles that offer practical, how-to advice. We’re also revamping the columns to focus more on topics of everyday interest to you and your teams. Watch for it next month!

Where will the news go? Onto the Web! We’ll continue our daily news coverage of the data center and systems management universe on sysmannews.com (and its RSS feed), and also through our free Systems Management Week e-newsletter.

Thank you for your support of Systems Management News. We hope you’ve enjoyed the stories that we’ve brought you so far, and we feel confident that you’ll like what we’re doing in October.



Related Search Term(s): desktop management, multicore, Windows, Microsoft

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