That brings back memories of a similar setup with hundreds of Windows servers booting over the network. We had regular “brownouts” even during the day just beca

That brings back memories of a similar setup with hundreds of Windows servers booting over the network. We had regular “brownouts” even during the day just because the image streaming servers couldn’t handle the IOPS. Basic maintenance would slow down the servers for ten thousand users and generate support tickets. I jumped up and down and convinced management to buy one of the first enterprise SSDs on the market. It was a PCIe card form factor and cost five digits for a tiny amount of storage. We squeezed in the images using block-level deduplication and clever copy scripts that would run the compaction routine after each file was copied. The difference was staggering. Just two of those cards made hundreds of other servers run like greased lightning. Boot times dropped to single digit seconds instead of minutes. Maintenance changes could be done at any time with zero impact on users. The whole cluster could be rebooted all at once with only a slight slowdown. Fun times.