One of the largest business service providers in the northeastern region of North Brabant in the Netherlands, IBN-groep helps people who live at a distance from the labor market to find paid work. IBN-groep recently moved to a virtual desktop solution based on Sun hardware and software that enables employees to access their personalized Windows XP desktop from any Sun Ray thin client or from their home network using Sun Secure Global Desktop Software. Because desktop data is now centralized, the solution is boosting efficiencies and simplifying administration.

According to Ten van Zutphen, supervisor of system administration for IBN-groep, "By creating a Sun VDI Software environment, we have freed ourselves from the time and expense of managing a PC-based infrastructure. In addition, end users have gained a more productive working environment."

Sun and DHS Informatisering helped IBN-groep design a scalable and fully redundant Sun VDI Software architecture for its 166 desktops. At the heart of the infrastructure are two Sun Fire X4450 servers to deliver the virtual desktops. Alongside those are two Sun Fire X4150 servers running MySQL Enterprise 5.1, which act as as broker machines and support the Sun VDI Software and Sun Secure Global Desktop Software. All the servers run on the Solaris 10 Operating System, and Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients are at the front end. Van Zutphen says, “We saw that the Sun hardware was incredibly well designed. We were impressed by how much power was packed into just a 2U form factor with the Sun Fire X4450 servers.”

The implementation proceeded on schedule and, by the end of June 2009, IBN-groep had installed the first 38 Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients at its main office in Uden. A number of employees were also testing Tadpole M1400 thin client laptops from General Dynamics for accessing the Sun Secure Global Desktop Software and using Active Identity tokens for secure authentication.

Van Zutphen noted, “The clients work a lot faster than a PC, and during the trial of Sun Secure Global Desktop Software people said they never wanted to go back to the old way of working.”

Although the organization is keen to move to thin client devices as early as possible, one of the key strengths of the Sun Secure Global Desktop Software is that it supports mixed thin-client and PC access as part of phased migration. This makes it easier for IBN-groep to manage costs and wider infrastructure goals over a sensible time frame and through using legacy hardware.

Once a bandwidth upgrade to the company’s data lines is completed in October 2009, IBN-groep plans to roll out the remaining display clients. As soon as the Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients are spread across the organization’s offices, employees who travel between sites are expected to save up to 45 minutes a day because they will have instant access to desktop sessions, resulting in an increase in productivity.

Furthermore, simply changing from PCs to Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients will reduce power consumption across the desktop estate and significantly lower TCO. Because the Sun Ray 2 has a mean time before failure of 22 years, IBN-groep will increase ROI across its client estate. By centralizing data on the Sun servers, the company is simplifying desktop management, ensuring greater IT performance. Plus, the Sun Secure Global Desktop Software makes accessing the back-end systems from outside the network more secure.

Van Zutphen says, “Soon we will have just one location with active data, and the rest of our desktop infrastructure will be terminals, so administration will be easier and more cost effective.”

More Information

Sun Desktops and Workstations

Sun Secure Global Desktop Software

Product Over of the Sun Secure Global Desktop Software

This article (in Dutch) describes the use of the Sun Virtual Desktop in fulfilling this objective. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter