Getting the servers to work in a cluster was painful. We also found that some applications worked better on desktop machines. And we discovered that many desktop-management tools had emerged for the PC environment, negating the management advantages of the diskless workstations.
Each time a problem arose, we brought in the vendor's sales, tech-support and professional-services teams to fix it. We complained, threatened and, when necessary, went over people's heads. Some of the problems were honest mistakes, but in other cases--such as the oversizing of the servers--we felt we had been sold a bill of goods. As this column goes to press, we are finally coming to the end of the workstations' and servers' lifetime, and we plan to replace them with regular computers.
Lessons Learned
Our experience with the diskless workstations, among other technologies, has helped us build a more mature acquisition process. Here are some guidelines we use for buying software, hardware and services:
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