>Doing this kind of thing is pretty new for servers. Even massive HPC clusters tend to boot from persistent disk. Not really, no. Servers all over the IT worl

>Doing this kind of thing is pretty new for servers. Even massive HPC clusters tend to boot from persistent disk. Not really, no. Servers all over the IT world have been using PXE and tftpboot for decades - in fact it was a very common method of booting a server even in the 80's. I know of quite a few Rail/Transportation companies whose track-side computers are booted over the network using these techniques, and there are about 250,000 of those things just in Europe alone .. What's new is that another generation are discovering this technique.