Quoting ComputerWorld
It's happening again: Spring has arrived, the birds are coming back, and I've got the light and happy feeling that the color of my paycheck will be changing soon. Maybe it's the way the sun stays longer over afternoon coffee with corporate expatriates and recruiters. Or perhaps it's the morning dew settling on the window as yet another executive on the other end of the speakerphone spins last fall's dead leaves into this spring's fertilizer.
It's a happy season for the cynical, when the I Told You So's come into full bloom as fresh winds encourage migration to more fertile hills. With an understated parting crow we shed our winter coats, tuck a few nesting branches under a wing, and take flight. I expect some time in the coming weeks I'll be having one of those plaintive exit interviews, make the appropriate dips and bows in the corporate dissolution dance, and finally go through the ritual return of assets.
It'll be different this year, though. You see, I don't have much to give them. Shhh. Don't tell the corporate hawks, but I haven't used their corporate-issued laptop in years.
Last summer
How can this be? When I came into my current corporate environment, the support savants cracked open a high-end laptop, installed all the latest office and security software, as well as management tools to push antivirus updates and a homing beacon to verify patches. They configured and tested, then packed it up and shipped it to me. Within a couple of days, I'd logged in, monkeyed around with a few settings, reinstalled some software by giving the helpdesk control through a WebEx session, and got up and running on what appeared to be wobbly newborn corporate legs. But that laptop is still in its box under my desk.
The problem is, I like my job. Were my interests and career sung to two different tunes, I might have a desktop computer at work -- a system that I shut down and left at the end of each day, with a separate one at home for email and games. But I live out of my computer. Work, reading, research, this column, test projects, pictures of interesting work locations, e-mails to and from my wife during the workday, and all other manner of data end up on my computer.
Early on, I didn't worry much about the occasional personal use of a work computer, and the resultant commingling of data. I was never foolish enough to leave embarrassing files for coworkers to find or to download *** at work, nor had I the inclination to send hostile emails to ex-girlfriends or bomb threats to competitors. But despite this quaint and innocent existence, I managed to accumulate a fair collection of personal documents, pictures and other files on my work computer.
At first, since I didn't have anything that was actionable or objectionable, I encrypted my sensitive work data and called it good. But one fine summer day in the late 90's when I and a hundred of my dot-com compatriots were unexpectedly herded into a public area of the company, I nearly lost a good bit of personal data. I hadn't had a chance to cull my data from the system, and had to beg a buddy in IT to burn my files to a CD before wiping the drive. It wasn't much -- just some family pictures and the beginnings of a book I still haven't finished -- but it opened my eyes.
Fall
As summer waned and the dot-bombs burst near and far, I found a new company, and spent the harvest on my own laptop after replenishing the stores of corporate-meltdown emergency cash. A clean separation would be good, I thought; and besides, having a separate computer gave me the freedom to tote a Powerbook around rather than the least expensive option in the corporate lease program.
A physical machine has some disadvantages, however. It means additional weight and bulk beyond the corporate laptop, and requires power and various accessories if it's to make evenings in a hotel or business center approximate the experience of a home system.
Corporate techies have figured this out on a much bigger scale, having to deal not with transporting systems but simply with tackling space, power, and cable-management issues for multiple systems in limited space.
The idea of compartmentalizing and compacting systems makes intuitive sense when you're standing in just about any operational datacenter. IBM's been making much marketing hay as they and other vendors sell physically reduced computer systems ("blades"), multiple emulated computer systems hosted on heavier-duty systems (virtualization), and various hybrid approaches that assign a CPU or storage to a virtual system but share other resources.
Blade systems allow for sharing of storage and memory, reduced power consumption, reduced heat output, and a smaller footprint -- all good things when you're shelling out the big bucks for power, cooling and building space. Having a farm of distinct systems also meets the functional needs of service providers whose clients want assurance that their data, processes and operating environment are isolated from the service providers' other clients. For those that aren't as stringent, the consolidation can be done mostly in software -- in a virtual machine -- on fewer systems or even on just one.
While carrying two laptops solved my immediate problem of isolating my own data, applications and operating environment from those of my employer and various clients, it became a pain... literally, a pain in the shoulder. Worse, some presentations and client engagements required two business systems and other accoutrements, which meant that I showed up at the airport with three laptops, a mountain of cables, the occasional projector, and barely enough space for a clean shirt and unmentionables. Short of installing a 4U blade server into a rolling Pelican Case, there didn't seem to be any other physical option. I'd accumulated too many laptops and was suffering for it, so I began to look at full virtualization.
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