Network booting can be used to centralize management of disk storage, which supporters claim can result in reduced capital and maintenance costs.
In the late 1980s/early 1990s, network boot was used to save the expense of a disk drive, because a decently sized harddisk would still cost thousands of dollars, often equaling the price of the CPU.
[citation needed] Contemporary desktop personal computers generally provide an option to boot from the network in their BIOS/UEFI via the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE).
[2] Typically, this initial software is not a full image of the operating system to be loaded, but a small network boot manager program such as PXELINUX which can deploy a boot option menu and then load the full image by invoking the corresponding second-stage bootloader.
Technically network booting can be implemented over any of file transfer or resource sharing protocols, for example, NFS is preferred by BSD variants.