Energy efficient computer labs and how IT can work to remove roadblocks

Via DD's Eco Notes:

I've been contemplating for a while how well a more energy efficient computer lab solution would fit our customers' needs.

Let's face it: off-the-shelf computers are becoming much more powerful than necessary. Five or ten customers could well share a single modern computer, since most of the time computers just sit idle, eating electricity and waiting for you to press a key.

We'd just need a off-the-shelf solution to achieve this, since developing such a solution from scratch would eat away its savings, and more.

The solution I've been concentrating on is the Sun Ray technology from Sun Microsystems.

You replace your with a .

The Sun Ray client connects to your monitor, mouse, USB and Ethernet, and lets you run 10 lab desktop sessions on one computer. It's stateless, all the processing happens on the other end. If the Sun Ray desktop client breaks, you just replace it, and you're back up and running where you were before the break.

The software that runs on the computer that powers the 10 desktop sessions is in the process of being open sourced. It runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

For security, you can have most of the applications that are delivered to the Sun Ray client and on the user's screen run on Windows, but some of the security sensitive applications like the web browser or email, can actually run on a Linux or Solaris computer.

To take the idea further, this makes it possible for a department to set up (or rent) machines to run a certain application just for their users, without it affecting the whole IT setup like business units delivering specific applications directly would today. If they start to use the application more, and it slows down, the department can very easily just have more machines run the application, and spread the load.

This way departments can dynamically scale their investment, if some application feels more or less important at some point of time, or there is a budget crunch.