Microsoft has a lot of ‘cloud’ aspirations. Not only do they want to provide apps, media-streaming and remote access via the cloud, they are also embarking on designs to stream the entire Windows OS to your computer, in the near future. The proof of this is now on display at the US Patent Office.
Conceivably Tech posts, “It seems Microsoft already has an idea how the Windows OS may evolve after Windows 8. The software giant has filed a patent (#20110197052) titled ‘Fast Machine Booting Through Streaming Storage’ which describes a chain of storage devices with different priorities that would boot the operating system through remote storage.
Microsoft’s idea is based on a virtualization of storage systems that is built using a chain of different layers of near (local) storage such as flash memory or hard drives as well as far (remote) storage.
The basic idea is that data which is required to boot a device will be pulled from far storage and streamed to boot up a computer. Data that may be required in the future could be kept in a cache in volatile memory such as RAM. All storage devices together form a virtualized environment that is managed by a hypervisor.
The patent application states, “Each component in the chain represents a specific region of the entire storage system, while the local computer would consider a remote storage device to be “locally” available. The streaming OS has the authority to prioritize those storage devices while the initial range of data such as 0-16 megabytes may be stored on a local disk, while range 16-32 megabytes may be stored in a remote file on a remote disk.”
According to Microsoft, the “technology facilitates fast boot because the virtual disk is available for use immediately, rather than needing to download an entire operating system image before booting from that downloaded image.” Such an OS environment would only load “a relatively small amount of data that is needed from the boot disk, which is available from the far data and/or the near data.”
Microsoft envisions such a service to only be available as long as data in fact needs to be copied to boot a computer or the absolutely necessary components at any given time: “In a computing environment, a system comprising, a virtual storage device for a machine that is coupled to a near backing store, and coupled to far backing store, at least until far data of the far backing store is not needed by the machine, the machine including access logic that services a read operation from near data of the near backing store when data corresponding to the read operation is available in the near backing store, or otherwise services the read from the far data.”
This offers some enterprise benefits, such as simplified, centralized provisioning of machines via a system like Windows Intune and remote recovery booting for systems that have experienced a local hard disk failure. As per the patent, only a comparatively small amount of data needs to be cached before a system can begin booting, thus making the process much quicker than the current process which involves loading an entire ISO worth of data before a system can start up.
Though this patent has come to the fore only now, Microsoft has been working on the concept for quite sometime now and their blogs have been discussing such systems as far back as 2009. Does this indicate that in the future Windows could be booted from the Internet? Quite possible, since this patent application is not just targeted at enterprise environments but virtually every type of computing device including mobile phones, PCs and set-top boxes.