Sharjah’s Scholars International Academy found that being environmentally aware wasn’t as challenging as first thought, when it chose energy efficient thin clients for its labs.
Environmental awareness is currently the ‘in thing’ for enterprises worldwide. What is debatable, however, is how many of them actually believe in being green outside of their marketing department – especially in a region with a reputation for conspicuous consumption and low utility rates.
That’s not a label that can be applied to Sharjah’s Scholars International Academy (SIA), which applied environmental awareness to the usually mundane task of building a new computer lab.
I put it across in two steps – first, that it matches our environmental aims, and second we would have 100% ownership.
Instead of filling its premises with power-hungry traditional desktops, SIA used thin clients from Sun Microsystems which claim to use only 4W of power, when compared to 16W for a normal PC.
It’s solid proof of the fact that one does not need be a massive regional organisation with millions of dollars in budget to achieve results which have a concrete effect on the bottom line.
John Nash, network manager and head of ICT for SIA, candidly admits that he is the IT team in its entirety and his new implementation is just 16 clients – but none of these facts stood in the way of his ambition for the new systems.
“SIA started back in September looking at various solutions involving a traditional Windows box with Windows servers sitting in the background. We weren’t particularly happy with that because obviously there is a spiralling cost to having Windows boxes – you’ve got the RAM, the hard drives and the power supplies. So much can go wrong, incurring a time cost to repair in terms of the actual unit and also in the fact that you have to replace the component,” he explained.
In the search to eliminate that cost, Nash went to GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK 2007, where he was impressed by Sun Microsystems’s thin client offerings – particularly the environmental component.
He returned to his board and presented them with two options – a regular Windows-based lab, or doubling the budget to allow for the thin clients. Nash explains how he convinced the board to opt for the latter.
“I put it across in two steps – first, that it matches our environmental aims and goals at SIA, and second that we would have 100% ownership which means that over a 10 year period our IT infrastructure would be greatly reduced because we wouldn’t have all of those costs associated with upgrade paths. For example, as we move from XP to Vista, it would normally mean that all the machines would have to be upgraded or replaced with new machines to meet Vista’s requirements,” he says.
With the selection complete, Nash installed the system in December with the help of Aptec and Foresight, Sun’s local integration partners. The system was actually intended to go live in November, but shipment delays in the US mean that the servers and thin clients arrived four weeks late.
Nash notes that the key driver behind the new implementation was the school’s desire to not just appear environmentally-friendly, but to actually incorporate green thinking into every aspect of the school.
“What we actually believe is that we should not only tell children about environmental issues, we should be showing them that we’re taking steps to actively be part of the solution,” he states.
“Our sports field is Tiger Turf – which means that we’re saving on the most precious resource in the UAE which is water. We also have an on-site water recycling plant so the water is used twice as a matter of course. The corridors were designed as open ones so that we don’t have enclosed A/C units running everywhere, only in the classrooms. Again, that helps reduce our carbon footprint,” adds Nash.Before choosing the thin client approach, Nash admits that he considered implementing a traditional IT infrastructure: “We were looking at maybe branded companies like Toshiba and HP, with upgraded RAM and hard drive capabilities. We also looked at generic machines from the UAE market, but obviously there’s such a variation on standards that we’ve felt it’s better to stick with a named brand because you get the reliability and quality.”
Once the decision was taken to opt for the radically different Sun setup, Nash began the implementation – and as the shipping delays prove – soon learnt to expect the unexpected.
“We went live as quickly as we could but our timeline wasn’t particularly fixed. We knew it was going to be a variable project due to the fact that we started so late in looking at our ICT provisioning, and with such a radical departure from the traditional Windows-based school approach. The four-week delay wasn’t particularly to do with Sun, it was to do with actually shipping into Dubai and the particular problems that we have at Jebel Ali,” he says.
During the delay period, Sun’s integration partners Aptec and Foresight improvised several solutions for the missing equipment, including providing their own office servers as temporary replacements. Once the servers finally arrived, Nash found that his problems were far from over.
“Our next biggest stumbling block was making sure that printers and the USB ports were working. We knew there had some been some issues from a lot of the blogs, but I wasn’t aware of the extent of it. And if you can’t use a USB port, you can’t use a printer – which is a disappointment for the students, who can’t print off their work for the board. This is always a big shame because children like to see the results of their work being displayed. However, I’m pleased to say that it’s not an issue now because we have implemented the latest software,” he notes.
Another teething issue had to do with the amount of RAM – quite simply, there wasn’t enough of it.
“Within the first month, we knew that we had underestimated the amount that was required. We assumed that 4 Gbytes would be fine – but that wasn’t enough to run 30 clients. Since then we’ve installed another 2 Gbytes,” adds Nash.
Post-implementation, Nash describes the uptime as being incredible: “The only time I’ve had to restart servers is after an area power failure. Other than that, the servers have remained up all the time.”
“I’d recommend any school to look at thin clients with Sun Microsystems. There is a steep learning curve obviously, because you have to get to grips with Solaris and the Unix operating system, but that is so minimal, especially if you have a good partner like Foresight or Aptec behind you – they actively encourage their staff to support schools rolling out their thin client systems. It’s been one of the easiest systems to manage,” he concludes.
SIA’s John Nash describes the reaction to the new thin clients from the parents of his pupils.
“We’ve had an amazing response from prospective parents as they’ve come round and looked at the thin client systems and talked about the environmental benefits, as opposed to a normal PC. Many parents are surprised that foundation one students will be using computers – they’re shocked that the Sun Rays only use 4W of power as opposed to a normal desktop that uses 16W of power. That’s mainly because of the fact there is no hard disk, no moving or whizzing parts – everything is held on the server. The thin client never changes – as we all know, the keyboard, mouse and monitor really hasn’t changed in design and concept over the last 60 years.”
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