purchased with a cheap CPU and minimal multimedia support, if suitable. Thus, cost savings may be smaller than they first appear for some organizations. However, many large organizations habitually buy hardware with a higher than necessary specification to meet the needs of particular applications and uses, or to ensure future proofing (see next point). There are also less "rational" reasons for overspecifying hardware which quite often come into play: departments wastefully using up budgets in order to retain their current budget levels for next year; and uncertainty about the future, or lack of technical knowledge, or lack of care and attention, when choosing PC specifications. Taking all these factors into account, thin clients may bring the most substantial savings, as only the servers are likely to be substantially "gold-plated" and/or "future-proofed" in the thin client model. Future proofing is not much of an issue for thin clients, which are likely to remain useful for the entirety of their replacement cycle - one to four years, or even longer - as the burden is on the servers. There are issues when it comes to diskless nodes, as the processing load is potentially much higher, thus meaning more consideration is required when purchasing. Thin client networks may require significantly more powerful servers in the future, whereas a diskless nodes network may in future need a server upgrade, a client upgrade, or both. Thin client networks have less network bandwidth consumption potentially, since much data is simply read by the server and processed there, and only transferred to the client in small pieces, as and when needed for display. Also, transferring graphical data to the display is usually more suited for efficient data compression and optimisation technologies (see e.g. NX technology) than transferring arbitrary programs, or user data. In many typical application scenarios, both total bandwidth consumption and "burst" consumption would be expected to be less for an efficient thin client, than for a diskless node. See also Thin client Network block device Diskless Remote Boot in Linux Preboot Execution Environment Notes References External links Network Block Device home page http://nbd.sourceforge.net/