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To improve water-service reliability and cut costs, the Italian utilities company Publiacqua decided to restructure its IT environment. "In an industry like ours," explains Luciano Caroti, ICT manager at Publiacqua, "IT is an important business support tool because it enables the optimization and automation of processes, thereby allowing us to reduce our operating costs."

Streamlined management has always been an important part of Publiacqua’s IT strategy. To this end, the company chose to implement a virtualized desktop solution from Sun Microsystems to replace 500 desktop PC workstations at 15 sites with Sun Ray 2 thin clients. As part of this project, the company choose to centralize its distributed application environment on SAP and run it on a local Sun Solaris server platform that is accessible through the Sun Ray thin clients. The multi-level architecture of Sun's solution, which uses Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure software and Solaris 10-based Sun Fire X4100 M2 and Sun Blade 6000 servers, allows all services to be centrally managed from within the data center.

"After assessing a number of thin-client options, we saw that Sun Ray thin clients were the most cost-effective solution for our needs,” says Caroti. “Adopting thin-client systems will change both the way we work and the way we see IT within Publiacqua. It will bring us major benefits, the most important of which will be a savings of $152,000 a year that is currently spent on servicing workstations."

As well as replacing its PC workstations, Publiacqua decided to migrate from its previous computing infrastructure to a Sun Fire E20K server with an UltraSPARC IV+ dual core processor running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The server is providing more than enough compute power to support 285 simultaneous uses of SAP software. Publiacqua chose the Sun Fire E20K server because it offered performance and reliability, as well as investment protection. The server architecture interoperates with a new generation of processors, providing maximum flexibility when upgrading to meet the company’s evolving needs.

In addition, Publiacqua deployed an enterprise-class Sun StorageTek 9990V storage system with 28TB capacity which provides the company with the performance and reliability it needs to store and archive data. The StorageTek 9990V also supports exceptional levels of consolidation and virtualization of heterogeneous internal and external storage systems under a single point of control using Sun StorageTek 9900 Universal Volume Manager. Sun StorageTek 9900 HiCommand Tiered Storage Manager stores and manages Publiacqua's data across tiers according to business value while Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage In-System Replication creates multiple copies of the organization's mission-critical data.

"These two projects are linked by the shared IT vision of Sun and Publiacqua that is oriented toward Web 2.0 models where applications are moving onto networks,” says Caroti. “It was also important for us to be able to use an environment such as Solaris OS, available as open source, tested by millions of people and supported by Sun Professional Services.”

The system installation was carried out with the support of TAI, a systems integrator and certified Sun Microsystems partner based in Florence and Pisa. TAI provides businesses and public-sector organizations of any size with cutting-edge technology solutions based on open systems and tailored to the individual need of the organization. Sun Professional Services was engaged to conduct a data center site inspection prior to hardware installation. A three-year SunSpectrum agreement is in place to provide hardware and software support should the need arise.

By using the Sun Ray thin clients, which have an average energy consumption of just 4 Watts — about 5% of the energy consumed by a workstation — Publiacqua achieved a 20-fold reduction in energy consumption. The reduction resulted in significant cost savings while promoting sustainable development. Adoption of a centralized infrastructure allows the company to run servers in an optimized, air-conditioned, and controlled environment.

Publiacqua expects productivity to improve because the virtual display clients offer great reliability than workstations. "For an organization such as ours with many different sites, improving system reliability is essential," explains Caroti. "Sun Ray clients break down less often because they do not have disks and other components. Even in the event of a fault, the architecture allows the session to continue so that repairs can be made in a matter of minutes without losing any work. In contrast, in the past a fault could compromise a PC workstation for a week."

There are also major advantages in terms of management. By controlling desktop configuration and application access from the server side, new virtual display clients can be set up quickly and employees’ configurations will move with them as they change locations. The solution also ensures a greater level of security by encrypting data sent between thin-clients and the server by enhancing the management of the user-access rights and by never leaving any data behind on the client device.

The new infrastructure has cleared the way for interesting development opportunities. Publiacqua plans to enable printing, copying, and faxing capabilities through the virtual display clients. The new capabilities will be controlled through the company badge, and Publiacqua is considering using the badge to certify email use. The company is also considering implementing VoiP capability through the Sun Ray clients.

 
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