[GRLUG] Amerisure ditches its PCs, goes all virtual

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 1:45 PM,  <donlumber at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Casey DuBois" <casey at grlug.org>
> To: grlug at grlug.org
> Sent: Monday, April 5, 2010 10:59:56 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: [GRLUG] Amerisure ditches its PCs, goes all virtual
>
> Anyone else doing this?
>
> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/040210-amerisure-virtual.html
>
>
>
> Well, it depends. Are they serving audio over the network as well? The biggest complaint I have heard about this setup or just plain ole
> terminal services through a thin client is not having the ability to view training videos etc..  Yeah, I know some aren't legit complaints
> but most of them have been.

Interestingly, we've had in-hardware decode of h264 available in
consumer equipment for a while. I've been using vdpau GeForce 210 (and
that's a *low* end card for something bought in the last year) on
Linux. Cool stuff.

If Microsoft extends their Remote Desktop protocol to channel raw (or
even encrypted; gotta love DRM) h264, then streaming video inside a
thin-client environment is no more difficult that watching Youtube on
your laptop. Dynamically-generated video might be a problem, though,
and would depend on dedicated hardware encode devices. I doubt we'll
see that soon, though; enterprise is slow to experiment, and while the
hardware encode devices exist, they're primarily targeted at the
professional video industry. Also, sadly, h264 ENcoding doesn't
parallelize well, so it would be tricky to offload that to the SPUs in
video cards or the multi-SPU cores we'll be seeing when AMD releases
their Fusion-based processors. (I can picture how it could be
parallelized, but it sacrifices compression ratio for encoding speed.)

-- 
:wq