Diskless Networks By Sam Morris What are Diskless

Diskless Networks By Sam Morris

What are Diskless networks? A diskless network is a group of workstations that have no individual hard-drives and relies on a network boot from the server to boot an operating system on to each workstation. As each workstations OS is booted and managed from the connected network, every file is stored on the network and is shared between them. With diskless networks, each workstation can be monitored and secured from outside threats with just a single security system on the server that hosts the shared OS. The network can be easy to manage as it’s just the server that contains the necessary parts to keep the network running and so the only thing that needs regular maintenance as well as being more affordable as workstations would require less parts being needed (no hard-drive).

Where are Diskless networks used? Diskless networks would be used in local companies or small businesses due to the reduced costs of having a shared system being produced and maintained alongside reduced power usage. Large companies with many outlets around the world would not use a shared system as each building would have different jobs and duty’s to do for the company and would each contain data that can vary in importance.

Advantages • Diskless networks have a overall reduced cost to both produce and maintain as it has a localised storage. Just one large capacity disk drive is required for just the network instead of many low capacity hard-drives for each individual workstation. • When there is an essential update that is needed for workstations, all the network has to do is download the update once and then copy a image of the OS with the update to every connected workstation instead of having to update each one individually. • Diskless networks only needs a backup of the file server as it contains each workstations data instead of a separate individual backup for each station if all files were saved locally or if each workstations OS had different configurations or updates made.

Disadvantages • The whole network relies on the server to be running so that each workstation will have a OS running alongside having access to files. If the server fails then each workstation would simultaneously stop working. • If one workstation is irresponsibly used and contracts a computer virus, it would quickly spread to the server the OS is hosted on and infect each workstation at the same time. If each workstation had their own hard-drive with it’s own OS then such a incident could be avoided by isolating the infected workstation.