Other IT individuals.... The opposite of Multi-Boxing.
Now first thing sorry for the sales pitch, but I think a lot of you can use this product, or know someone who might. I am an IT Director for a small school district in Wisconsin. I started there about a year ago and proceeded to upgrade what I could with our very tight budget. This summer my task was to renovate one of our labs of 22 computers all 9 years old.
I looked at Dell due to us having a state contract with them. Even something reasonable was gonna be $700 per workstation to get decent vid, mem, cpu. $700x22= $15,400
I looked at ncomputing and their thin client solution $219 for 4 workstations running off one host. $1000-$1200 pc x6 plus $219 x6 = $8516. Draw backs to this system is no usb support at each workstation. Proprietary hardware with crappy video at each workstation.
I looked at Betwin software solution. $99 per seat, uses dual head video cards and usb connections to make a multi-station environment. Was a pain in the ass to setup the mice and keyboards, support was out of China. I was not happy with their trial.
I tried Userful out of Canada. $99 per seat, uses Linux OS so runs with much less resources than Windows. My problem was all the effort to get single login with my Active Directory network for 500 students on these hosts. Also the sales team at Userful is really hard to get a hold of. Plus all of our Windows education software that doesn't work well with win.
Finally, I found SoftXpand. Again $99 per seat, setup was extremely easy. Just install, login to the machine, run the start program, it logs you off and brings up login screens to your 4-6 workstations. All having a message under the login screen to hit crtl-shit-F# and dbl click the mouse buttons to assign the keyboard and mouse to that screen (which I only had to do once btw) The trial comes with an 80 hour time limit so I had plenty of time to really test the system. The software also comes with a Console Viewer so I can remote into the host without anyone knowing from my office (using remote desktop) and run console viewer and look at any workstation on that host without them seeing. Having students who try to get around the content filter or at least challenge it this comes in handy. You can of course take control of the mouse and keyboard to fix any issues the user might be having. The software also comes with an tool called ClassXpand which allows you to emulate your workstation to the others on the host, so if a teacher is trying to present something she can broadcast it to the rest of the class on that host.
So with this lab I essentially built 5 multi-box gaming machines. Q6600 processors, SLI boards with SLI Memory 4gigs each, and 4 machines running 2 8800GT video cards with 1 running 3. I have SLI turned off seeing I need each head available with nothing linked. My cost averaged to about $1200 per machine to build. Due to the lay out of the lab I had to have 4 hosts with 4 workstations each, and one host having 6. I purchased 22 USB keyboards with USB sound built in so each workstation would have sound via plugging in a standard headset into the keyboard. All done the lab cost about $9000 to build, counting a couple USB hubs, and cables. This software is used widely in Europe, Africa, the Middle East; however, I was the first site in the United States so they did give me a slight break on the seat fees.
The nice thing about this lab setup is the lab is rarely completely full. Even if it is and each person is running something that is a total resource hog, they are still getting 2.4ghz, 1gig of ram at 800mhz and a share of an 8800gt at worst. I could run WoW on that never the less Adobe Illustrator or some CAD programs or MS Word. But, what if only one workstation is being occupied on the host? They get the full capability of that machine. Or, say there is 3 ppl on them but two are only surfing the Internet? Their resources are almost nothing so the 3rd person can still have 3+gigs and most of the processing power at their disposal. The software doesn't evenly split the cpus resources, it allocates them to where needed, so if you don't use them you don't lose them someone else can use them.
Well after running this lab for awhile and there being no distributors in the US, this became my "Remington Commercial" moment. I didn't buy the company but I did become the first distributor of this product in the US.
My website is Multi-Station.com and even though its live this moment, it will not be completely finished till sometime around the weekend. If you would like more information or would like to download the free trial just to play around with by all means check out Miniframe they are the makers of the software and located out of Israel.
Again sorry for the sales pitch, but I know I can't be the only one looking for a solution to keeping up on hardware with a limited budget. I also am looking to use this product at home, 2 kids fight over the computer all the time. Put two flat screens back to back with keyboards and mice. $300-$400 between monitor and licenses and you have a second computer with less space and energy costs. Energy costs I didn't even get to. The average pc uses $10 a month in electricity. With this lab I went from 22 to 5. Saving roughly $170 per month in electricity. When I get done doing the other 3 labs at my school, I will save enough in electricity each year that this savings alone will replace the hardware for a lab each year.
If you read through that wall of text I thank you, and again sorry for the sales pitch.
You can always ask me questions at dlockstein@multi-station.com
Or I'm always in my vent server. V04.DARKSTARLLC.COM port:9000 pass: duckhunting
