EMBARQ

Communications Provider Cuts Costs, Increases Security, and Speeds Productivity with Sun Microsystems Thin Client Solution

EMBARQ is a Fortune 500 company and provider of innovative communications offerings in the United States including Internet, wireless, telephone, satellite TV, and managed-network services. Based in Overland, Kansas, EMBARQ employs 18,000 people in 18 states. In 2007 EMBARQ had revenue exceeding $6 billion.

Customer Challenges

Reduce administrative and deployment costs of workstations
Securely log into the network and maintain integrity of company data
Boost productivity of administrators
Maintain high availability of applications

Solution

EMBARQ deployed a virtual desktop solution at a network-operations center in Florida. The new solution - built on Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Ray Software, Sun servers, and the Solaris 10 Operating System - provides anytime, anywhere access to multiplatform resources that reside on servers in a secure datacenter. Employees can access their individual desktop environments with a thin client or any Internet-enabled workstation.

Business Results

Cut costs by approximately $600,000 by implementing a Sun Ray solution
Boosted availability to 99.999% using Solaris Cluster
Strengthened security with Solaris 10 and stateless Sun Ray thin clients
Sped performance using T2000 and T5240 servers running the Solaris 10 OS
Increased productivity
Simplified system administration

Products and Services

Story Details

In 2005, EMBARQ sought a way to reduce costs, boost security, and increase productivity at its network operations center in Winter Park, Florida. Before EMBARQ deployed the virtualized desktop solution, 400 employees who manage network resources used workstations to run multiplatform applications locally or to access memory-intensive applications on servers. Because employees required a consistent operating environment with the latest software releases, administrators spent considerable time maintaining hundreds of workstations, each of which cost between $1,500-$4,000. Performance and availability posed additional challenges. Applications that ran on servers were slow at peak-usage times, and workstation failures lowered availability levels. In addition, employees had to shut down applications when they left their workstations for an extended period and had no way to connect to the environment from remote locations. Security was another concern because network data could be stolen from a workstation disk taken offsite or discarded.

EMBARQ learned about the virtual desktop solution from Sun Microsystems whereby an employee would use a thin client to access his or her complete operating environment locally by accessing information running directly off servers. "We selected Sun because of the trusted relationship developed through our partnership with Sun," says Kevin McBride, Network Systems Administrator III at EMBARQ. "Overall, our security and comfort with Sun are very high. Sun's support and sales teams always give 110%."

" The cost savings we have realized are astronomical. A single Sun Ray costs us roughly $250 whereas a workstation costs $1,500 to $4,000. We also no longer have to perform upgrades on hundreds of workstations. We just update ten servers and we're done. "

— Kevin McBride, Network Systems Administrator III, EMBARQ

The solution was implemented in three phases between 2006 and 2008. EMBARQ initially replaced workstations with 400 Sun Ray 1g thin clients and later upgraded some of them to Sun Ray 2 and Sun Ray 2FS clients. The thin clients connect to a file server - a Sun Fire T2000 server that uses an UltraSPARC T1 processor and the Solaris 10 Operating System. The file server uses the ZFS file system and Citrix to manage communication between multiplatform servers and clients as well as four Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays to store data. In addition, the Solaris Cluster software provides high availability of the ZFS file system to ensure high availability of user's home directory data with no downtime. "Solaris Cluster provides a superior method of high availability. Our overall availability is 99.999%. No other solution has been able to ensure us with such tremendous uptime" says McBride.

Applications that run on the Solaris 10 OS are supported by six Sun Fire T2000 servers and four Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 servers that use UltraSPARC T1 or UltraSPARC T2 processors, and Sun Ray Software 4.1. Windows-based applications run on eight Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers that feature AMD Opteron processors. The Java Desktop System supported by the Solaris 10 OS, provides an easy-to-use desktop environment and administrative tools that deliver capabilities such as remote system access. The new Sun servers provide for faster application performance, even at peak usage times, and can support hundreds of additional users from other locations. "The new UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors are just off the chart for performance," notes McBride.

As a result of its new solution, EMBARQ has increased security. "We don't have to worry about disks walking off with crucial network data," says McBride. "All data resides in the secured datacenter. The other big benefit is ease of management. We can manage all of our resources from our desk, instead of having to physically work on a workstation at each user's desk."

EMBARQ has also significantly reduced costs. Rather than spending up to $4,000 to replace a workstation, EMBARQ can purchase a Sun Ray thin client for $250. The new servers also take up less space than older models and use less power, especially the servers featuring AMD processors which provide industry-leading performance per watt.

Because of the success of the first deployment phase at Winter Park, EMBARQ installed a virtualized-desktop environment at another network operations center in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2007. The company is considering doing the same at other network operation centers across the country.