It wasn’t so long ago that if I wanted to do serious computing, I needed to walk across campus and go to the computer lab to access PC versions of SAS or Mathematica. Matlab was over there, too. Sure, I could get Matlab running on my PC, but if I wanted to finish up my work sometime before the next day, I needed something with a bit more get up and go.
Most universities have high-end computing labs, in addition to more basic labs, but with the ubiquity of student laptops, the latter have become anachronisms and the former are hardly consistent with distance education or anytime, anywhere computing that students expect. On the other hand, most students come to school with laptops powerful enough to run the applications I mentioned above, but configuration management, support, licensing, and any number of hardware issues can all interfere with high-performance computing, no matter how powerful a student’s laptop might be. Dell, with VMWare and Citrix powering a complete end-to-end solution, announced its Virtual Lab effort Monday to deal with the changing face of university computer usage.
The Virtual Lab can take on many forms. The concept is hardly exclusive to Dell since desktop virtualization and streaming technologies have become both more affordable and more common. However, what Dell does provide is a set of server hardware, optimized virtualization solutions, and a variety of thin and zero clients to meet varied requirements in modern university settings.
What does all of this mean? It means that when a student needs access to a high-end workstation running the latest specialized software, they can connect via PC-over-IP zero clients that can reside in any number of locations completely separate from the workstation that can live securely in a data center under the watchful eye of administrators. It means that students can, from the mobile or desktop device of their choosing, access standardized lab environments without consuming space and energy with underutilized public labs. It means that those public labs can be converted to ultra-energy-efficient thin client labs connecting to virtual desktops and it means that students can always enter the same, customized environment with a complete set of applications, regardless of their physical location.
This isn’t meant to sound like a Dell advertisement, although it probably does. Dell just happened to package a number of well-planned hardware and software components under the Virtual Lab umbrella, all of which stand to, if not save costs, at least make the outdated idea of a computer lab suddenly add value for students and IT administrators. Regardless of the actual vendor or particular solution universities choose, the trend towards centralization and virtualization points to an important shift and maturing of technologies in this space that can potentially yield a host of benefits across the higher education enterprise.
