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Innovative use of energy efficient Ultra Thin Clients by the Rural Payments Agency

By OGCbuying.solutions

Doing things differently is not the traditional way of thinking within the many government organisations, but the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) part of DEFRA, have done just that with their revised approach to desktop technology and the results look very promising.

The Defra CIO Chris Chant has supported the initiative from inception and has followed its progress with some interest, Chris commented recently that

Defra is a ‘family’ of organisations (including agencies) and as CIO I am keen to ensure that we encourage and properly leverage the results of all good ideas and initiatives put forward by family members. This initiative in particular had a good deal going for it including meeting challenging environmental change targets, and proving the expected reductions in total cost of ownership of IS. I understand that the user feedback regarding the solution has been very positive during the extended pilot, and this includes recognition of performance gains for key RPA applications

With significant cost-savings projected over the term of the contract, it would appear that while carrying a certain degree of risk, doing things differently is an essential first step towards improvement.

During my time outside, as well as within government organisations, this seems like one of the most attractive deals I have been involved in Says John Gray, Head of Strategy and Architecture at RPA and the driving force behind the project.

We've negotiated a fully managed service contract to deliver a completely warrantied desktop service for under £30 per user per month, which as far as I can see offers us an unprecedented return on investment, especially when compared to spending elsewhere in the public sector.

This service offering incorporates the most up to date techniques for virtualisation and application management including Microsoft Softgrid and VM ware products.

The outcome of a recently completed pilot has been so successful that the team at the RPA believe they have just set a new benchmark for cost savings and carbon reductions that can be achieved; by replacing traditional desktop PCs (fat clients) with energy-efficient Ultra Thin Clients (UTC). The project will bring about a 260 tonne reduction in the RPA's Carbon footprint, starting from a lower than average footprint, as energy efficient screens had already been deployed throughout the agency. This makes a significant contribution to the overall target to reduce emissions by 10% by no later than 2010; these savings have been verified by Defra. The transferring of screens and other desktop peripherals to the new partner has also added to the green effect of the project as these will not be replaced unless it is essential.

With over 300 pilot users happy with the solution the focus now shifts to deploying the technology for 6,000 desktop users over six sites by the end of October. An ambitious target, made possible by moving to a wholly server-based method of application and desktop delivery. There is very little end user training required, the device is truly ‘plug and play’ so skilled effort in deployment is minimised, and the repeatable migration process has been verified and proven.

The contract to design, test and subsequently provide a fully managed service to support the new hardware is to be carried out by Reading based company, UKN Group backed by Catalist partner, DGSi following a full Catalist procurement. They were able to demonstrate tangible expertise in making such a solution work and convinced the RPA team that they could competently manage a large-scale transition away from fat-client PCs.

At the RPA, desktop PCs are going to be replaced with a Sun Microsystems product known as Sun Ray, a completely stateless device without any local processing power or storage capability.

photograph showing a Sun Microsystems Sun Ray device

The device is only 8 inches high and one inch wide, desktop space saving at its best

Aside from the cost implications, we have found the UTC technology works extremely well and the users involved in the pilot stage have been very positive about their new systems, commented Jim Green, Technical Project Manager.

He went on to say, in spite of the lack of any onboard processing power on the UTC we've also seen improvements in the performance of a number of our critical applications.

This service offering incorporates the most up to date techniques for virtualisation and application management including Microsoft Softgrid and VM ware products.

The initial projection had been to migrate up to 75% of the RPA's users over to thin-client because of concerns over the sheer number and variety of applications. After the very successful results of the pilot, those projections had to be revised, with coverage set to increase to over 98%.

Following a successful roll out of the complete solution, it is expected that momentum will continue to grow for the UTC approach, pioneered within the RPA, to become the champion/exemplar for other government organisations. Indeed John Suffolk has promised to visit RPA during October to assess whether the solution warrants ‘champion/exemplar’ status.

Key Business Benefits

Enables greater and more effective staff mobility, both within and between key RPA sites, contributing to increased organisational flexibility. The device is no longer specific to an individual/user and RPA users will be able to logon to their applications from any device in the estate. Major movement of schemes between sites will now be achievable far more quickly and cost effectively.

The growing costs of PC additions and movements lead RPA to believe that eradication of these costs were essential for the organisation.

  • The ultra thin client device does not require any specific support and maintenance activity as there is no need for updates or patches to the device. The mean time between failure of the Sunray is 22 years and the plug and play nature means that as long as a LAN port exists deployment is virtually instantaneous.
  • Due to the nature of the new solution, replacing the desktop every 3-5 years will no longer be necessary at the RPA and the considerable effort and business operations interruptions associated with replacement activity will be avoided.
  • An unexpected benefit has been the size of the measured performance gains achieved for some of the RPA key business applications.
  • RPA expect to see major cost savings in the management and deployment of new services and applications to users due to applications now being packaged. The lead time to deploy a new application to the desktop in now measured in days rather than weeks.
  • The effort involved in future upgrades to RPA Microsoft services should be dramatically reduced and delivered far more quickly, the intention to upgrade to MS 2007 seems far more viable now.
  • The RPA benchmark showed that deploying 4,400 Sunray thin-clients represents an expected real saving of £174,000 in electricity bills per year.
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