Sun Ray Thin Clients Help Renowned University Improve Desktop Computing Performance and Accessibility
Nicknamed "Valpo" by students, faculty and staff-Valparaiso University is a private Lutheran university located in Valparaiso, Indiana. Founded in 1859, Valpo is consistently rated among the top 100 universities in the midwest by U.S. News and World Report. It has a student population of approximately 4,000 students and boasts five undergraduate colleges, a graduate school, and a law school.
Customer Challenges
Simplify management of desktop computing environment across campus
Reduce associated administrative costs
Enable multiplatform desktop computing in scientific labs
Solution
To eliminate complex, costly and time-consuming administration of problematic PCs, Valpo is deploying more than 120 Sun Ray virtual display clients across its campus—in labs, in the newly constructed 30,000-square-foot library facility, in its administrative offices and dormitories.
Business Results
Significantly reduced IT administration time—from 8 hours a week to 1 hour a month–in critical lab environments
Reduced risk of loss by theft or system failure
Enhanced desktop computing performance
Increased public kiosk uptime—from 50% to more than 97%
Founded in 1859, Valparaiso University is known for the quality of its liberal arts education and professional programs. The university has nearly 4,000 students in its five undergraduate colleges, and its graduate and law schools.
Valpo is as proud of its high-tech campus as it is of its reputation. With an annual IT budget of $2.5 million, Valpo's Information Technology department coordinates and manages the university’s servers, data networks, wired and wireless networks, and all campus computing facilities—in classrooms, lecture halls, research areas, administrative buildings and residential facilities.
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The PCs we had traditionally deployed across campus were always problematic. They were fairly expensive to acquire and maintenance costs were always very high because the IT team to fix them on an ongoing basis. With the Sun Rays, we have eliminated virtually all of those issues.
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— Simon Kissler, Senior Systems Administrator, Valparaiso University
Valpo has long been a Sun customer, and has several enterprise-class Sun servers in its IT environment.
But Valpo Senior Systems Administrator Simon Kissler is always on the lookout for new ways to apply technology to address the university’s educational and business challenges. So when Sun Partner company Dewpoint put together a demonstration of the Sun Ray virtual display client, Kissler knew he'd found the answer to a particularly vexing problem.
The recent expansion of the university’s scientific labs in its Geography and Meteorology departments required the purchase of 30 new workstations, with the ability to run both UNIX and Microsoft Windows. To have outfitted the labs with PCs would have been cost-prohibitive—as much as $6,000 per workstation—and would have required a significant time commitment from IT to maintain. By contrast, the Sun Ray, at half the size and consuming only five percent of the power of a traditional PC, offered a smaller footprint, dramatically lower power consumption and the ability to run both UNIX and Microsoft platforms from a single desktop—all at prices significantly lower than comparable PCs.
In addition, because applications reside on the server, IT staff no longer has to manually update each desktop, but can simply update the servers to provide the latest applications and virus updates to workstations across campus. That capability reduces IT maintenance requirements by 97 percent—from eight hours per week to one hour per month. Solaris 9 and 10 Operating Systems run on the Sun servers that support the Sun Rays.
Server-based computing has also greatly enhanced desktop system performance, particularly in the Meteorology Department, where students study extreme weather, both in the lab and in the field.
While one team of students ventures out to track a hurricane on the ground, another team stays behind in the lab to monitor weather reports and satellite data and passes that information on to the field team. A lab PC freezing up at the wrong moment can put the lives of the field team at great risk, but with the Sun Rays, system lockups are a thing of the past. Today, should a lab desktop go down at a critical moment, a technician can reset it almost immediately, even from a remote location.
Valpo IT staff was so impressed with the Sun Rays in the labs that university administrators decided to deploy them in other environments. Valpo replaced the PCs in its on-campus kiosks— which students use to access e-mail, course schedules and other campus information—with the Sun Ray thin clients, and nearly doubled availability in the process. The PCs were down nearly half the time, while the Sun Ray clients have provided 97 percent availability. The university has also replaced PCs in the College of Engineering, and has chosen to deploy Sun Rays throughout its newly constructed, state-of-the-art library and research facility.
Future plans include the deployment of Sun Rays at each of the university’s dormitories, as well as in its administrative buildings, to provide low-power, secure and highly available access to the university’s electronic resources.
