CASE STUDY
Why it pays to be
Wyse before the event
How an IT system helped the UK's first purpose-built university campus of the 21st century
win eco points by consuming less energy and creating less heat.
A
t the beginning of the And as befits a state-of-the-art university to help reduce QMU’s ventilation and power
new Millennium, when it campus that also lays claims to being requirements as well as its It costs.
was clear that edinburgh’s environmentally friendly, it contains all Muir recalls: “Natural ventilation is
Queen Margaret University manner of intriguing features including an intrinsic to the sustainable design of the
(QMU) had outgrown its three 1960s sites, It system that was chosen early on in its Craighall campus, but this posed a challenge
the decision was taken to relocate to a birthing process, as opposed to being bolted for the information services department at
single purpose-built campus at Craighall on further down the line. QMU. the problem is that standard PCs
on the outskirts of the city, giving the new Why was this unusual approach taken? consume too much power and pump out too
location the distinction of being the UK’s first According to Fraser Muir, QMU’s much heat to run in large numbers without air
purpose-built university campus of the 21st director of information services and the conditioning. the building design stipulated
century. learning resource centre, the rationale was that the desktop computing platform should
be limited to approximately 45 watts of
power per device. the heat produced by
conventional PCs combined with the heat
generated by people simply could not be
handled by natural ventilation, so a better
solution needed to be identified.”
the answer was a mass switchover from
PCs to an It infrastructure based on thin
client computers and a strategic change to use
of centralised computing.
“the solution used the latest thin client
technology from Wyse Technology,” says
David Angwin, director of marketing eMeA,
Wyse technology.
What is ‘thin client’ technology?
According to Wyse technology, it is “a
stateless device which provides a PC-like
experience with no moving parts. It offers
lower power consumption, lower carbon
emissions and is much easier to manage at a
lower cost.”
how many people does the thin client
system have to cater for at QMU?
“Around 5,000 people,” says Muir,
but although the system met the energy
efficiencies demanded by the architects,
he recalls that he needed re-assurance
that information systems based on thin
clients could deliver the same, if not better,
performance than the networked PCs already
in use by staff and students.
So a proof of concept was set up and
around 5,000 students and staff at QMU use the thin client computers.
managed by Fraser and his team in January
16 SUSTaInable SolUTIonS December/January 2009
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