Gebeco

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Gebeco specializes in high-end adventure holidays and educational travel throughout the world, including South America, South Africa, China, Hong Kong, and the entire Far East. Based in Kiel, Germany, with 200 employees, the tour operator serves 70,000 travelers each year. Some years ago, the company developed its own reservation system for bookings based on the now rarely used OS/2 operating system. Thomas Schönemann, IT manager at Gebeco, says, “This meant that all of our 200 PC workstations also ran on OS/2. Eventually it became a problem because the productivity solutions that we used at the time were no longer up to standard and were effectively obsolete. As a result, we wanted to introduce OpenOffice and other new programs, but they no longer supported OS/2.”

Rewriting the Gebeco reservation software for another operating system would have been extremely costly. Instead, Schönemann looked for an alternative that would allow the company to continue using the OS/2-based software programmed in-house while simultaneously introducing new systems and applications. After investigating virtually all emulators with this requirement in mind, the choice was clear: VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems. “It was simply the best emulator when it came to OS/2 integration,” says Schönemann.

This decision also opened up another opportunity for Gebeco: the possibility of migrating from PCs to thin clients. “Of course, we were also motivated by the benefits of lower maintenance costs and reduced power consumption,” says Schönemann. The tour operator calculated the costs of this alternative, as well as the option of continuing to operate the PCs as X-terminals. “Our estimate showed that both lower power consumption and maintenance costs made thin clients a viable option, and we decided to migrate to Sun Ray technology.”

The company had other good reasons for choosing Sun products: It had been using Sun servers for a considerable time and also wanted to expand the use of the Solaris Operating System. In addition, the company’s local IT service provider, Baltic Online, was a Sun partner, and its individual employees had extensive expertise in and experience with the required solutions.

Baltic Online managed a test run involving six Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients, which further convinced Gebeco that thin-client technology was right for the business. Once Baltic Online received the order to implement and size the system, it was a relatively smooth migration. After a short training course, 20 test users worked on the Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients for about a month. “There were envious glances, because the new systems were much faster and easier to use,” says Schönemann.

The remaining employees were all using the new system within two months of the implementation, and the company has been using a total of 200 Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients since October 2008along with two Sun Ray 2FS Virtual Display Clients for developers. In addition to using the proprietary reservation system, Gebeco employees also take advantage of Firefox for Web browsing, Thunderbird for email, and OpenOffice for productivity applications. There are also various programs required by individual employees that were gradually integrated into the new solution.

The Baltic team implemented both the Sun Ray Server Software 4.1and the applications on four Sun Fire X4440 Servers and two Sun Fire X4150 Servers. The Baltic Online team invested a lot of time and effort in planning the distribution of the software so that subsequent administration would be as simple as possible. As a VPN client is integrated into the Sun Ray solution, further Gebeco sites can also be connected to the server farm easily — as soon as those sites are ready to migrate from desktops.

One of the main benefits are power and cost savings. The new infrastructure has reduced electricity consumption significantly and is saving the business €7,000 a year. In addition, if the horizontally scaled computer farm becomes too small, it can be expanded with another machine without any difficulty. “In that situation, we simply have to clone the server. It only takes two hours,” explains Schönemann. And the failover concept couldn’t be simpler. Should a server ever fail, the remaining machines assume the burden. “We use computers running the Solaris Operating System almost exclusively in the server room and are very satisfied with their failure safety. The business systems they support are completely stable. And we don’t want to use any other operating system.”

Employees are also enjoying the benefits of the new solution. Instead of having to wait a long time for their computers to boot up, they simply insert their ID cards into the Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients and away they go. “Login is now much faster than with the previous system,” confirms Schönemann. In addition, employees welcome the ability to use their ID card to switch easily between computers and take all of their data with them. “Call center staff also take their IP telephones with them when they switch workstations,” he adds. When the existing telephone system is replaced, all the other employees will benefit from this feature as well.

Noise reduction is another benefit of the new solution. “It is much quieter, and now, in summer, we’ve noticed that the buildup of heat is much lower,” Schönemann adds. The amount of maintenance required has also been reduced. It now takes minutes to do what took hours before. New software has to be installed only once on the server — and everyone can use it immediately. And if a user has any difficulties, the IT specialists simply connect to the system via the user help desk and solve the problem.