Bad Soden am Taunus

German Council Reduces IT Power Consumption 61% Using Green Computing Solution from Sun

The council of Bad Soden am Taunus is responsible for day-to-day administration of the town located near to the city of Frankfurt. It represents some 21,000 residents, many of whom work in the nearby city, which is Germany’s financial capital. The council helps promote the town’s many thermal and mineral springs, which have made it famous as a spa resort over the years.

Customer Challenges

Lower IT power consumption
Make desktops more cost effective
Cut the workloads of IT administrators

Solution

The council virtualized desktops and consolidated the server estate using a combination of Sun thin clients, servers, and storage systems. The new environment, which now includes a disaster-recovery site to improve redundancy, is both cost effective and simple to manage.

Business Results

Cut power needs across the IT infrastructure by 61%
Reduced power consumption on desktops by 40%
Reduced administration workloads greatly

Products and Services

Story Details

Greater eco-responsibility is a long-standing goal for the Bad Soden am Taunus council, not least because residents believe the local authority should set an example of best practice for local businesses to follow. Because the German town, near Frankfurt, is a spa resort famous for its thermal and mineral springs, it has a special interest in protecting the environment. Still, owing to Bad Soden being obliged to make best use of taxpayers’ money, the council has to ensure that the economics of green working practices are feasible before incorporating them into existing ways of doing things.

Bad Soden am Tanus saw the business case for eco-responsibility growing much stronger with the rising price of electricity. Suddenly, it made greater financial sense to reduce the carbon footprint and take advantage of the cost savings that were now possible. So when it came time to replace much of its server and desktop environment, the council put low energy consumption high on the list of requirements.

" Our virtualized desktop and consolidated server infrastructure from Sun has helped create a greener IT environment, which is low cost and simple to manage. "

— Andreas Fiedler, Head of IT, Bad Soden am Taunus Council

The smart move was to change from a traditional to a virtualized desktop and consolidate servers and storage to reduce energy consumption and simplify administration and management. Andreas Fiedler, head of IT at Bad Soden am Taunus council, says, "In view of rising energy prices, we hoped that our energy consumption would at least remain static following the introduction of the new IT infrastructure."

First, the council deployed a combination of Sun Ray 2 thin clients, Sun Secure Global Desktop software, Windows Terminal Services, and VMware ESX 3.0.2 software to virtualize the desktop. Next, it implemented a Sun Fire X4200 M2 server with AMD Opteron 2000 Series processors and two Sun Fire X4600 servers with Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8000 Series processors, as a new server backbone. The council also deployed two Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays and a Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system to deliver data storage. The council decided to replace the existing non-redundant infrastructure with a highly redundant environment, mirroring the architecture across two small datacenters.

A comparison of the old computers with ultra-thin clients showed that the new desktops used 40% less electricity than the previous machines. A study of the previous infrastructure and new infrastructure — which included desktops, servers, and storage — showed that the new environment was consuming 31,112 kilowatts less electricity per year, equivalent to 61%, which would deliver energy savings of €11,000 within three years.

Aside from the cost savings, the other major gain was simplified management. "Our administration work has been greatly reduced thanks to the centralized administration," says Fiedler. By making its systems redundant, the town council has also been able to establish a security plan that goes above and beyond anything it had previously.