By Nick Heath, 3 March 2009 16:45
NEWS
One of Whitehall's largest departments has rejected thin client technology - less than a year after it was identified as a way of greening government IT.
Minister for farming and the environment, Jane Kennedy, revealed the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had decided against using thin client technology, where lightweight, low power machines access applications held and run on central servers.
Defra felt the extra cooling that would be needed in central server halls would suck up too much power, Kennedy said.
Replacing power hungry desktop PCs with thin clients was flagged as one way of reducing energy consumption in the government's Greening ICT Strategy, the recently published Cabinet Office guidelines on how Whitehall can become carbon neutral by 2012.
Kennedy told Parliament in a written parliamentary answer yesterday: "Defra carefully considered the promotion of 'thin' clients, which are centrally managed computers with most of the function of the system located in a central server room.
"However, evidence to date has shown that the increased electricity consumption of these server rooms (e. g. through the air conditioning needed to cool the room) renders this technology less attractive than previously thought from an energy efficiency perspective."
Defra is more progressive when it comes to home working, with 11,520 staff registered and equipped for remote access.
Kennedy added the department has also mandated a set of minimum environmental standards for commonly purchased products, including IT.
Comments
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1. anonymous
And they didnt think to virtualize the servers, and use some form of heat recovery. so heat out of the room either heats the office or convert to cooling.
2. patrick newman
Fragmented thinking. Most servers are grossly under-utilised and over cooled. Most PC's are as watt hungary as servers.
Heat from servers could be could be displaced to office heating in the winter and water heating in the summer.
It is not obvious that home working always brings green benefits. If it means we heat our homes during the working day and heat our increasingly empty offices at the same time. A whole systems study is called for.
3. anonymous
This is just wrong -- a server can be made far more efficient. How about the cooling required in the offices for all of the desk top machines?
Sounds like a cop out -- why couldn't they just say that everyone wants a laptop and no one likes the idea of something "new".
4. TP
This is unbelievable. The savings from moving to thin clients are real in money and in environmental terms. Given that DEFRA has ~11500 people working remotely, the flexibility and speed of response of these people would have been drastically improved. It is difficult to understand the decision on economic, environmental and business levels. It is also likely to deal the thin client computing industry a severe blow in this difficult economic climate.
5. Stuart Fawcett
With so many home workers it may have cost Defra lots more in electricity bills to provide hosted virtual machines for all, maybe its better to let the home workers pay for the electricity & office space etc?
Green is good but cash still underlines most decisions.
6. anonymous
The irony that DEFRA, don't want a Citrix/Think Client Application Farm amuses me :-)
!
7. David Angwin
Good to see from other comments that the majority are finding this conclusion very strange. At Wyse we have customers that prove very significant carbon savings from thin computing including the increased datacentre load. These are achievable either with a Citrix XenApp model or with virtual desktops. More importantly in the current economic climate; these carbon savings are being achieved with even bigger cost savings. In comparison, laptops are typically the most expensive user device to manage and secure.
8. drew stephenson
Yep, we have a division in romania that operates with a waaaay lower cost base for much the same job due to using a thin client base and low power desktop boxes.
I suspect they haven't done their maths properly
9. Simon Bramfitt
I find it remarkable that the additional cost of data center cooling is cited as justification for abandoning this project.
Aside from the failure to look holistically at cooling as an enterprise cost not just a data center cost; there is sufficient published data available now to show that outside air cooling is fully effective in providing data center cooling needs for the data centers in temperate climates for most of the time. It looks like Defra are failing to consider the full picture.
10. Robert Pogson
They are probably using that other OS. If they switched to GNU/Linux on their terminal servers they could reduce the number of servers needed by a factor of two or three because of shared memory applications.