Time Warner's PCs support PXE boot technology, which lets the machines remote-boot directly from the system image that the Ardence server delivers. PCs boot over the Gigabit Ethernet network faster than they did when running locally, Shetty says, and bypassing the local disk drive has saved on support costs. "Eighty percent of our trouble tickets are hard-drive-related," he says. The downside, he adds, is that building the images used for streaming can be time-consuming.

Shetty doesn't use Ardence on 350 machines outside of his call center because those don't share a common application set. "You'd have a ton of images for those," he says.

Neoware's Image Manager attempts to reduce the number of images required by creating a virtualization layer that allows a single image to run on different systems. "We have a virtualized driver model that lets the operating system boot regardless of what the hardware is," says Neoware CEO Michael Kantrowitz. It is limited, however, to only those drivers that are built into Windows. Applications with unique drivers require a separate image. With both products, administrators still must create different images for each desired application set.

Speed and Flexibility

At Westgate Resorts Ltd., systems administrator Brett Lazenby builds the baseline system images and streams only the applications. He is halfway through deploying AppStream to more than 4,000 PCs at the Orlando-based time-share company.