The project has prompted savings of over £7m at the group. I had to provide a virtual environment that was available 24/7 from anywhere.” “If you get a laptop it will be fantastic but maybe three months down the line the performance deteriorates, the same goes with service. “I couldn’t offer a service that was anything less than we had with the physical legacy system,” Kalimeris adds. But one of the main benefits has been centralised management, which means things like software updates and patches are pushed out centrally. Calls to the IT department have dropped, which has enabled the IT team to focus on more strategic operations. In 2009 it began deploying VMware View to over 1,000 staff across all the Group’s divisions, at a cost of just £800,000. The project began three years ago, when Newcastle’s infrastructure consisted of around 9,500 PCs and Macs. We looked at what technologies were available and looked at what we now know as cloud computing, but what was then just an idea, a vision, a challenge – to offer the same desktop and laptop experience across our sites.” “We could have followed a mainstream way, but that would have cost us £8m, or we could have done nothing, which was a no-go area, or we could moved ahead. “The challenge was to take all these issues we were facing and encompass them in a manageable environment that would help us move forward,” says Dionisis Kalimeris, project manager at Newcastle College Group. The company needed a major overhaul to meet its aim of a more standardised, centralised IT infrastructure. Following rapid expansion the group found itself with a large, disparate IT infrastructure, much of which was out of date. ![]() It has over 40,000 students, nearly 4,000 staff and, due to a number of acquisitions and mergers in the last few years, operates across 100 sites. One company that has picked up desktop virtualisation is Newcastle College, a large educational organisation based in the north east of England. It will be picked up in the short term because it makes economic sense,” he says. “I’m not going to say we’ll replace PCs but it will have a big impact. While Pano Logic’s Kish won’t go as far as predicting the death of traditional desktops, he does think that virtualisation will become a viable alternative for many firms. “With the introduction of the Wyse Xenith zero client, the first adaptable, no-compromise, Citrix HDX-fluent zero client, we’ve realised a vision to deliver the benefits of high-performance virtual computing without the limitations associated with PC computing.” “Desktop virtualisation and cloud computing will render the old PC hardware model obsolete, says Tarkan Maner, CEO at Wyse. According to the firms Wyse Xenith offers no local configuration or management has very little attack surface, protecting it from malware and is capable of launching a full Windows desktop in seconds. Kish used to run Wyse, who recently announced a tie-up with Citrix to offer a zero client platform. A zero client is likely to be a total investment of between $500-600, Kish says. ![]() You’re moving spend away from the end point and into the data centre, money is going on things like storage rather than PCs,” Kish tells CBR, adding that the total cost of buying a PC can range from $650 to $750, including elements such as assets, software and management costs. “If you force all the computing into the data centre it’s more efficient, it reduces IT admin workload and is cheaper to manage and maintain because it’s centralised. There is no operating system, no processor, no software, no firmware and no memory, everything that makes it run runs through a data centre. The user essentially sites in front of a screen that is connected to the network. Zero client is another step on from thin clients. That’s where the industry is heading again, believes John Kish, CEO of zero client vendor Pano Logic. In the early days of computing, before components became affordable for the masses, users would sit in front of a terminal that was connected to a big machine somewhere else that would do all the processing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |