Patent ID: 8495348

Claim:
A method, comprising: root booting a plurality of computing devices from a read-only base volume of an attached storage device, the read-only base volume stored in at least one solid state drive, the read-only base volume containing at least one operating system and at least one application program common to the plurality of computing devices; receiving writes for the read-only base volume from the plurality of computing devices; redirecting the writes for each of the plurality of computing devices to a particular volume of a plurality of volumes of the attached storage device, each of the plurality of volumes of the attached storage device including a redirect on write snapshot of the read-only base volume, each of the plurality of volumes of the attached storage device being dedicated to a particular computing device of the plurality of computing devices and storing data particular to the particular computing device of the plurality of computing devices, the data particular to the particular computing device comprising at least one of at least one registration key, at least one virtual memory swap space, or at least one temporary file; storing frequently accessed data of the read-only base volume in a dedicated portion of a cache of the attached storage device; storing frequently accessed data of the plurality of volumes in a plurality of dedicated portions of the cache, each dedicated portion of the plurality of dedicated portions of the cache configured to store frequently accessed data of the particular volume of the plurality of volumes; determining data common to each of the plurality of volumes; updating the read-only base volume to include the data common to each of the plurality of volumes; removing, from the plurality of volumes of the attached storage device, the data common to each of the plurality of volumes upon updating the read-only base volume to include the data common to each of the plurality of volumes; and mirroring the at least one solid state drive with at least one additional solid state drive.