Rural Payments Agency

Sun Ray Technology Spares the Environment, Delivering Cost Savings

Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is an Executive agency of the U.K. government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). The agency’s primary and strictly regulated responsibility is paying more than £1.6 billion (US$3.3 billion) to farmers in the form of land and other subsidies. Among its other responsibilities are completing rural inspections and tracing the movement and lineage of livestock. Like all DEFRA agencies, RPA has a keen focus on environment-friendly, sustainable business practices.

Customer Challenges

Reduce total cost of ownership for PC desktop environment
Increase IT flexibility while reducing the administrative burden
Meet environmental regulations for reducing the carbon footprint 10% by the year 2010

Solution

This U.K. government agency has replaced its thick client desktop environment with the Sun virtual display client solution to meet environmental requirements, reduce costs, streamline administration and increase IT flexibility.

Business Results

Anticipated reduced cost of employee desktop computing by UK£20 million (US$41 million) over 7 years and almost £200,000 (US$412,000) in power costs per year*
On target to cut carbon emission footprint by 260 tons per year, ahead of schedule*
Is cutting the time required to roll out application updates from weeks to days
Improved IT flexibility and eased employee mobility needs

Products and Services

Story Details

For the past five years, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has operated with a solution that has included Sun enterprise servers to run core Oracle applications. Based on this experience, John Gray, Head of IS strategy and architecture, views Sun as a creative business partner and is open to hearing more about Sun technologies through periodic briefings.

It was at one of these briefings that Sun first presented the Sun Ray solution and its benefits. “What initially interested me about the solution was that it would work with our Microsoft environment and so I agreed to do a proof of concept,” explains Gray.

" During the past five years, Sun has taken the time to understand our business and helps us develop technical solutions to meet our goals. The Sun Ray is no exception where Sun has helped me reduce our total cost of ownership as well as meet environmental requirements. "

— John Gray, Head of IS Strategy and Architecture, Rural Payments Agency

The 12-person proof of concept showed that Sun Ray devices worked with the Oracle and Windows environments. While RPA was pleased with this first step, it requested a full-scale 300-employee trial to show that the agency’s 110 different applications could be used with Sun Ray technology. Gray felt this was essential to ensuring successful end-user adoption.

Sun and RPA together established the solution architecture. In addition to Sun Ray 2 virtual displays, a Sun Fire T2000 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System was chosen for the Sun Ray Software due to its CoolThreads technology and excellent price/performance ratio. On the back-end, virtualization technologies were already in place to optimize the Windows Terminal Server and application layer.

The system provides added data security and the reduced time associated with applying software updates. The solution enabled new application roll-outs in days instead of weeks, and this meant some new Microsoft applications could be incorporated sooner than anticipated.

Following feedback, RPA commenced procurement of the Sun Ray system. The agency asked for a seven-year managed services contract, with assets owned by the service provider and RPA paying fees for their use. The winning bid was from Sun Advantage Partner UKN Group and the installation process for 4,200 employees kicked off in June 2007 with a careful employee communications and training program.

To date, the solution has received high marks on performance, noise reduction and especially mobility. Employees often need to travel to different offices and they can easily log in from any RPA location. Similarly, a Sun Ray solution with government-approved encryption techniques has provided home-based access for some employees while protecting sensitive data.

Using a DEFRA calculator to compare the Sun Ray to thick clients, the agency will reduce its already low carbon footprint by 260 tons per year and will eliminate two three-year PC technology refresh cycles. Gray calculated electricity savings of £174,000 (US$358,000) annually based on lower power consumption and cooling costs.

Additionally, the monthly desktop service charge per employee has fallen to less than £30 (US$62), resulting in an overall savings of £20 million (US$41 million) in seven years. This savings will be used to fund other business operations. As for the future, Gray is participating in some initiatives to study broader use of this Sun Ray solution to help lower costs throughout the U.K. Government.

* Calculations verified by DEFRA
Footnote: Exchange rate based on £1 = US$2.06