Green IT Toolkit

Hanging on to PCs

David Braue ZDNet Australia

Published: 17 Aug 2004 11:15 BST

Finding a new lease on life
Manufacturing giant Smorgon Steel has kept many of its desktop PCs for the better part of a decade. Smorgon, which has 2400 active desktops around Australia, began using thin-client technology from Citrix in 1998 in limited deployments, but now includes Citrix MetaFrame technology in its normal PC lifecycle.

"At the end of three years, if a PC is still working and the user is still happy with it, we'll leave it there. If not, we pass it down the chain to someone who doesn't need as much power." Once the computers get too old to run current operating systems, they're wiped clean and reloaded with a MetaFrame client application that lets them function as dumb terminals. Linked to an ever-growing bank of application servers, the refurbished desktops can access modern Windows applications regardless of their own computing power. A number of systems are so old that they're running the DOS Citrix client.

Using this approach, Smorgon has managed to slow down its desktop-buying cycle and stretch far more years out of its systems than would normally be anticipated. "Citrix has evolved over the years into a way we can get the most life out of a box," says Paul Simmonds, the company's infrastructure services manager.

"We'll run a PC until the cost of repair is greater than the cost of buying a thin client. At the end of three years, if a PC is still working and the user is still happy with it, we'll leave it there. If not, we pass it down the chain to someone who doesn't need as much power. Servers are the same: if we've got a high-end server that in three years' time ceases to be high end, it makes a great Citrix server."

Simmonds says nearly 95 percent of Smorgon's users are now relying on the Citrix client "in some way or another". Monitors are reused as long as they continue functioning. And on the network, Simmonds says, "the only thing we replace is the odd dead hub or router; most of the big-end stuff just seems to go on forever."

In the long term, this translates into significantly reduced IT capital costs, allowing expenditure to be funnelled away from desktop purchases into other priority areas. And once the systems are absolutely too old to do anything, Smorgon simply sends it to the company's internal recycling operations -- a normal part of the business that serves a convenient double purpose in the context of old IT gear.