Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 02:05:47 +0200
Subject: Linbox Net Station beats Thin Clients - State Secretary gives a try
From: "Jean-Paul Smets" <jp@smets.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net

Hi,

I assisted last saturday to the opening ceremony of a school in Saint Dié
(France) which uses a very interesting Linux technology for its computers. I
think this technology may be very useful to the Linux community and start a
revolution in Network Computing,.

This technology, called the Linbox Network Architecture (LNA), has just been
released by Linbox (www.linbox.com), a European Linux computer designer. The
Linbox Network Architecture allows to set up computer networks virtually
compatible with everything and at a much lower price than thin clients or
traditionnal client-server.

Linbox's main product, the Linbox Net Station,  have just been installed in
a school in Saint Dié (France) which is also the home city of the French
State Secretary of Industry. The Linbox Net Station is a diskless Linux
Computer which boots from a Linux server through a 100 Mbps Ethernet
network. Thanks to compatibility software such as VMWare, it can run both
Linux, Windows and MacOS at the same time. Multiple Linbox Net Stations can
be served by a single server.

According to Linbox (http://www.linbox.com/products/lna/save.html), the
Linbox Network Architecture beats hands down thin client solutions both in
terms of cost, compatibility and performance. All this thanks to Linux and
Linbox's Beolin netboot technology. The main rationale behind this result is
that thin client solutions tend to require high-end servers in order to run
applications. With the Linbox Network Architecture, all calculation are
handled by Net Stations, not by the server. As a result, an entry Linux
workgroup server is sufficient to handle up to 32 Net Stations. And because
the Linbox Network Architecture is based on central management policies, the
overal cost of ownership is extremely low (up to 75% cheaper than client
server according to linbox).

Saint Dié, a city in the Lorraine region (France) has decided to give a try
to the  Linbox Network Architecture for its new school. It seems that the
try was quite successful. French Officials, including the State Secretary of
Industry, as well as SuSE Vice President came to Lorraine for the opening
ceremony of the schoolŠ and tried the Net Station with Linux, Windows and
MacOS (everyone was actually quite surprised to see a diskless
Intel-compatible computer booting Windows, MacOS and Linux transparently).

The Vice-Mayor of Saint Dié in charge of education told us that he was
initially  hesitating between 4 Apple iMacs and 8 Linbox Net Stations for
its school and that what convinced him to choose the Linbox solution was the
fact that it saved administration costs and that each teacher could define
his or her own environement on virtual disks stored on the server. This way,
software installed by one teacher on one virtual disk can not conflict with
software installed by another teacher on another virtual disk. Each Net
Station can change configuration instantly by selecting and booting on a
different virtual disk. Multiple stations can use the same vitual disk in
read-only mode and store user files on the server Linux partitions. This
way, students can not destroy the environement prepapred by the teacher.

I think this technology can really be great for education where people need
to use computers for different purpose.

Regards,

JPS.

PS. You can find a report and pictures at
    http://www.portalux.com/nnl/
    http://www.linbox.com/news/october1999/saintdie.html