Our 'concept' Windows ACI is using Windows Terminal Services. This technology, renamed Remote Desktop Services with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, has been available as a service/role of the Windows Server operating systems since NT. Its maturity has allowed for a great deal of documentation to be developed about managing it, the quirks, and its strengths and weaknesses. This provided us a sort of head start to assessing the challenges of leveraging it to delivery the robust environment we have envisioned. We are not using the R2 version, hence we continue to refer to it as Terminal Server, due to the fact that Server 2008 R2 is not supported (at least currently) by the major cloud computing service providers. That is fine as it does not appear that any of the enhancements or features provided with the R2 release offer any additional value to our project.
Terminal Server is Microsoft's solution for server based computing (SBC). I find that ironic given it was Microsoft's popularization of desktop computing that lead to it replacing the original SBC... the mainframe. Using SBC allows us to provision access to requested research data by instead focusing on providing the working environment for the researchers to perform their analysis. Researchers can remotely access a server we create for them. Once logged in, they are provided a standard Windows-style desktop with the tools and applications they require to perform their work, using a copy of the requested data. The remote session or connection to the server will appear as just another 'window' on their own desktop or laptop computer. They will not be able to move items to/from the remote server to their computer, but will be able to interact with all the applications installed on the server as they normally would.
The question of course is can we satisfy our security requirements while giving the researcher a rich environment with good performance?
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