Thursday March 30, 2006
Pat on the back for Intel PAT
BY H. AMIR KHALID
KUALA LUMPUR: Intel Corp’s Intel Platform Administration technology (PAT), developed in 2004 for the Internet cafe business in China, is working well for companies in the same business elsewhere in Asia, according to officials of the chipmaker.
The server-based technology, designed for maintaining networks consisting largely, or only of identically configured PCs, saves cybercafes time and cost in maintaining their PC networks, as Inferno World owner Michael Goh attested in Kuala Lumpur recently.
Goh owns 20 Inferno World Internet cafes throughout Malaysia, with a total of 1,000 machines in all. His company is one of five Malaysian companies that have adopted Intel PAT as a solution, according to Intel officials.
According to him, Intel-Pat PCs save more than half the time when copying large image files, three hours rather than eight, and require fewer technical staff to maintain.
Intel PAT consists of a combination of motherboard technology, firmware, client and server software and application programming interfaces. One key part of the solution is Intel Platform Administrator, which provides the interface to PAT.
PAT was developed at the Intel research and development facility in Kulim, Kedah, according to Intel sales manager Sunny Ooi. Intel’s PAT-enabled motherboards are also made in Kulim, he said.
Ooi admitted that Intel PAT is not suitable for typical small- to mid-sized businesses, which do not have large numbers of identically configured PCs. But aside from Internet cafes, it is suitable for learning laboratories and schools, which do have such machines.
Intel Asia-Pacific general manager John Antone said, "We are currently getting feedback on what works in Intel PAT and what doesn’t. We hope to incorporate this feedback in future generations of Intel PAT."
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