How does it sound to reduce the time and money your IT staff spends on PC maintenance from eight hours per week down to one hour a month? That's just one of improvements Valparaiso University experienced when they switched from PCs to Sun RayTM virtual display clients.

With an annual IT budget of $2.5 million, Valparaiso's Information Technology department coordinates and manages the university’s servers, data networks, wired and wireless networks and all campus computing facilities — in classrooms, lecture halls, research areas, administrative buildings and residential facilities. That money has to cover nearly 4,000 students in its five undergraduate colleges and its graduate and law schools. So when the school needed to simplify the management of desktop computing across the campus, they chose Sun and partner company Dewpoint. Dewpoint's systems engineer Larry Harker worked on the pilot project for the university to help the students be more efficient and handed it off to Valparaiso Senior Systems Administrator Simon Kissler.

Valparaiso Senior Systems Administrator Simon Kissler was impressed by the demonstration of the Sun Ray virtual display client. "The PCs we had traditionally deployed across campus were always problematic," Kissler explained. "They were fairly expensive to acquire, and maintenance costs were always very high because the IT team had to fix them on an ongoing basis. With the Sun Ray virtual display clients, we have eliminated virtually all of those issues."

The Sun Ray virtual display clients made a good fit for the needs of the university’s scientific labs in its Geography and Meteorology departments. Students studied weather in the field and the lab, sometimes traveling outside in hazardous conditions to collect data. In the past when a PC had problems or stopped working, life could have been at risk. But the Sun Ray virtual display clients can be reset remotely if needed.

The stateless nature of Sun Ray virtual display clients allows for complete session mobility, improves workflow and helps ensure the protection of data. With the Hot Desking capability of the Sun Ray virtual display clients, users can move their session from desktop to desktop, supporting increased mobility, collaboration and the ability to share desktops.

Their labs needed 30 new workstations that could run UNIXR and Microsoft Windows. The Sun Ray virtual display clients cost less per unit than PCs would have. Other advantages from the Sun Ray virtual display clients include the low power they consume, only five percent of the power of a traditional PC.

In addition, because applications reside on the server, IT staff no longer has to manually update each desktop, but they simply update the servers to provide the latest applications and virus updates to workstations across campus. That capability reduces IT maintenance requirements by 97 percent — from eight hours per week to one hour per month.

Because Sun Ray virtual display clients are stateless, the appliance only needs to be plugged in. No set up is required. This helps reduce time and costs required to install and maintain desktops.

The university realized they could have these benefits in other departments, and they decided to deploy Sun Ray virtual display clients at on-campus kiosks where students access email, course schedules and other campus information. The Sun Ray virtual display clients provided reliability that the PCs did not. The PCs were down nearly half the time, while the Sun Ray clients have provided 97 percent availability. The university has also replaced PCs in the College of Engineering and has chosen to deploy Sun Rays throughout its newly constructed, state-of-the-art library and research facility.

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