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Pentland Brands, Engineering DataXpress Offer Customer Snapshots Reductions in IT Infrastructure TCO; Improvements for Developers
Customer snapshots provided by Pentland Brands and Engineering DataXpress give readers insight into the issues involving the reduction of TCO as a result of replacing a desktop PC environment with Sun Ray ultra-thin clients (the story at Pentland Brands), and those surrounding adapting proprietary solutions to newly evolved operating systems (the business of Engineering DataXpress, which also experienced increased engineering productivity on Sun workstations using the Sun Java Desktop System software). The sportswear firm succeeded in cutting TCO by a range of from 50 to 67 percent and reducing support calls by a margin of 77 percent. Pentland Brands
At Pentland Brands, management determined that its legacy IT infrastructure needed replacing. Impressed with the simplicity and the economy of operation of the Sun Ray clients, they opted for a company-wide implementation. Pentland Brands spokespersons report that the Sun Ray ultra-thin client enabled the company to centralize problem resolution and management of desktop applications across the world, dramatically reducing support costs and desktop system TCO. The company installed more than 450 Sun Ray clients for users at eight different locations. Pentland Brands also deployed Sun Enterprise 4500 servers to host the central Sun Ray Software and later migrated them to newer Sun Fire V440 servers running the Solaris 9 Operating System (Solaris OS). The company was able to reduce its IT support staff by 60 percent and avoid the cost of an enterprise-wide upgrade of its PC hardware and software while also reducing the number of laptops in use by providing its staff PDAs plus mobile application support via Sun Ray Software. The Sun Ray allows Pentland employees to access their applications from any Pentland Brands location or web browser. Engineering DataXpress
In the case of Engineering DataXpress, it became possible to increase the productivity of developers working with the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS). The company managed to qualify its UNIX-based products for Solaris 10 OS on both AMD Opteron and SPARC platforms in less than 10 days, roughly half the time estimated for the operation. John Eurich, president and CEO of Engineering DataXpress sees focus as critical for his company, saying, “With all of the choices available, and the number of Linux versions increasing, we’re trying to identify which platforms are the best ones for our industry, and commit to provide and support products on them.” The qualification at Engineering DataXpress called for building 16 combinations of the company’s 63 UNIX products. “It was the easiest port we’ve ever done,” says Eurich. “And transparency! It’s tremendous to run an operating system on different processors and have the environment be functionally identical. We don’t have to be as careful with memory management using the Solaris 10 OS — it has always been good about going virtual. Other platforms use it and hang. Engineering productivity on Sun workstations has also improved noticeably using the Sun Java Desktop System software. Our engineers used to switch between environments to do debugging, but they’ve been staying on the Sun Java Workstation.”
An example of the efficiencies realized by this qualification is in the speed with which a full regression suite, which used to take four hours, was performed in 3.43 minutes. “The Solaris 10 OS running on Sun systems featuring the AMD Opteron processor are the fastest UNIX platforms we’ve used,” concludes Eurich. A further encouraging result is that the platform proved to be 33% faster than Windows XP on a dual 3.2GHz Pentium 4.
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The sportswear firm succeeded in cutting TCO by a range of from 50 to 67 percent and reducing support calls by a margin of 77 percent.
Pentland Brands, Engineering DataXpress Offer Customer Snapshots
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