What does an organization lose in a transformation away from a central computing facility?
Teter: We have gone through this exercise. All the scientists at Corning have their own workstations. The only issue is to have sufficient standardization so that help can be obtained from experts from other organizations. The biggest problems are maintenance and system administration. Charles Clark: There is a large human effort to maintain a Unix workstation for the typical scientist. (Someone): What about backup? Law: At DuPont the workstations on the network are centrally backed up. Schwartz: Is there some organizational environment where these issues are being tackled? Is there some way that NIST could get involved in solving this? Teter: Ultimately the corporation wants to view maintenance as a service that can be contracted out. Semerjian: Does one lose capability in losing the central site? Teter: The units believe that they can do it on their own. It works fine until something breaks and then they need an expert. Semerjian: Are there any problems we can’t solve by going to wor
