Sun will showcasing its thin client technology at the G8 conference this week in an attempt to highlight the environmental benefits of using more efficient PCs and utility computing strategies.
The company has sent a team to the conference, which begins on Wednesday, to install its Sun Ray thin clients in some of the main press and delegate areas. Sun's UK managing director Trudy Norris-Grey will also be visiting the conference to promote the company's sustainable computing message to the representatives and G8 leaders.
Sun claims that its Sun Ray thin clients require around 15W in comparison to the 300W for an average PC. The heat output is one-tenth that of a PC and considerably less environmentally sensitive material is required to during manufacture, the company says.
"This is the participation age — everyone involved in technology, whether they manufacture it or consume it, must act now and become more responsible in their attitudes towards IT, whether that’s recycling PCs, sharing code and best practice or challenging traditional purchasing models." said Norris-Grey.
Sun has met with representatives of US President George W Bush ahead of the conference to explain its approach to greener technology. Richard Barrington, Sun's head of public affairs and public policy, said that the US is playing catch-up with the UK when it comes to embracing a sustainable approach to computing. "The UK Primer Minister is firmly focused on climate change but the US needs to work at it a bit more," he said.
Barrington admitted that so far there is no real independent third-party research to back-up Sun's claims that thin-clients are a greener alternative to traditional PCs but claimed that the company would welcome such an investigation.
Despite pushing the thin client model since the early nineties Sun has failed to make significant headway with the technology, but extolling the environmental benefits may help as manufacturers and users have to deal with legislation such as the EU Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment directive due to come into force in January next year.
Speaking at a recent Sun conference to promote sustainable computing, Jonathan Steel, director of analyst company The Bathwick Group, said that PCs in the UK account for 1 percent of country's total power usage.
He also said that more efficient approaches to IT need to be found as the technology industry could well be the next focus for the kind of activists who have targeted the tobacco or chemical companies. "We believe that if there is a bus trundling down the road towards you, it is better to get out of the way before it arrives," he said.
Talkback
What they don't say is that Thin client technology shifts the problem to the Datacenter where organisations need to house all the servers that provide the backend processing to the Thin client.
In a large organisation this can cause a massive increased demand for datacenter space with its associated power and cooling demands which significantly offset the savings at the front end.
If you can't adjust your office air-conditioning down to reflect the reduced heat generation in the office then you get a very poor picture I suspect.
As with all things, this is a complex puzzle which needs careful consideration.
Isn't the datacentre where IT should be managed? Managing desktops in the datacentre by professionals has a far great chance of stopping incomning viruses and from stopping information theft.
A different approach...
Gencosys, Inc. -- The IT Utility Company
Utility Style IT Departments – A myth or an inevitable reality?
All small and medium size companies continue to struggle with the perils and costs associated with starting and scaling their IT infrastructure to support growth or strategic goals. Few, however, realize there is a better way than simply deploying PC’s, laptops, and the many servers and IT personnel needed to support them. For many, there is a better way—and easier, too…
The Traditional Approach
Most companies follow the same old path of beginning IT operations; they go out and procure PC’s, laptops, servers, and a lot of people to support tAnonymous Readerhem. The only real decisions they make are what brand, whether or not they are Unix or Windows platforms, and what software applications they’ll deploy on them (and pray). Today, this approach to deploying IT infrastructure and services is somewhat akin to building a hydroelectric dam to power just your house.
Stuck in the Status Quo
For many small and medium sized businesses, executives and IT management simply get stuck in the typical late majority rut and remain skeptical of accepting new technology or ideas until they are more widely adopted by a majority of their industry peers. Not that many of these people aren’t early adopters or innovators, many are. The usual reason for blindly following the traditional path is that they often don’t have the time or resources to conduct a thorough technical and financial evaluation of new technologies. Also, many simply believe in the perceived “less risk” in the conventional PC deployment.
Challenging the Status Quo – Think Thin
One alternative to the traditional (PC) approach and available for many years now is thin-client technology. It has been proven time and again that, in many cases, thin-client deployments are far and away very efficient, less expensive and far less problematic than the traditional PC or client/server model. The model throws out the conventional wisdom of computing and allows an “Utility” approach in getting IT services. Not only are thin-client deployments easier and far less costly to manage, they offer a plethora of other advantages over the traditional approach such as reliability, serviceability, availability, flexibility, and inherent user productivity gains do to the purpose-designed and centrally controlled desktop environment. The centralized nature of the model is highly secure, easy to upgrade, backup and scale.
At their most minimal, thin clients are little more than local networks ports connecting a screen, keyboard and mouse to a remote server. They cost as little as $200 per unit, and require virtually no local maintenance. Modern diskless clients are small enough to be mailed to users, and a faulty device is as easily changed as a light-bulb with no loss of data, which is quite unimaginable in the current PC-oriented computing world.
A New Crest On a Not-So-Old Wave
Enter Gencosys, Inc., a Silicon Valley upstart that has advanced the thin-client model to a different level by integrating open source applications and thin-client technology into a hosted ASP solution. This fusion of technologies has produced another alternative to the traditional approach by creating a new slant on the concept of utility computing.
Gencosys’ solution allows organizations large or small to offer application and desktop IT services at a fraction of the cost of deploying fat-clients and essentially becomes the customer’s IT department. Instead of procuring PC’s, servers, software, and all the people to required to support an internal IT environment, the customer simply subscribes to Gencosys’ service and Gencosys ships or installs the desired thin-client desktops. The ultra-thin client connect to Gencosys Computing Exchange (GCX) and all the data are stored in a secure and redundant data center. Users are given a SmartCard that provides instan