The ultimate office and media rigs!

I am a great fan of Lifehacker’s workspace of the week feature. I have been dropping in and out of it for quite some time. In all my drop-ins I have found the workspaces which I liked. There were expensive rigs, triple monitors, cool keyboards, fantastic chairs and great interiors. But none of them come close to what I am about to share. Interestingly these rigs are from India. Mint has featured a series on the future of Internet. There were two articles which piqued my interest. One was about Cognizant’s senior VP home office. Another was the media center of Partner, Nippon Enterprises South, Chennai.

The ultimate home office of T. Sridhar, Senior vice-president of Cognizant is really and ultimate home office. There is literally no need to step out of home. Starting from redundancy built in to the broadband connection by fusing four connections in to one line to the continuous backup to four 1 terabyte NAS mounts, this home office has it all. iPad works has a remote control to talk to all these diverse gadgets.

Here’s what ultimate home office consists of :

• Buffalo Technology’s Terastation Pro
• Dell SP 2309 W 24-inch monitor
• Tandberg video conference
• Cradlepoint Travel Router
• Intel Core I7 CPU
• Apple iPad
• Western Digital storage
• 16 MBPS broadband (four broadband connections fused in to one line)

If you are done with the amazing home office, then let’s get to the ultimate media centre. An Apple TV to download movies and TV shows over a leased line which can be download at 100Mbps speed, a 110-inch JVC projector to watch the downloaded movies on the big screen, iMac for the computing, Xbox for gaming and iPad to control them all from the couch. That’s the recipe for a great media center. See how it is laid out.

If you are planning to build one, here’s what the ultimate media center consists of  :

• XBox 360
• Pioneer Blu-Ray player
• iMac
• JVC DLA-RS 20 Projector
• Apple TV
• Yamaha DSP-Z11 Amplifier
• Broadband (Leased line with incoming speed of 100 MBps)
• Apple iPad

The common thread between both the home office and the media center is iPad. All the devices are remotely controlled via iPad. It’s all good and I want to envy them but actually don’t. Except for one. The broadband connection. Isn’t it incredible to have four broadband connections fused into one for redundancy?