Infotech Lead Brazil: SENAI (the Brazilian National Service for Industrial Training) in Santa Catarina has selected Cisco VXI (Virtualization Experience Infrastructure) for desktop virtualization.
Prior to their virtualization initiative, three of the SENAI/ SC chosen branches had IT environments with 300 computers with different configurations. This required IT to maintain a large number of operating system images at once.
SENAI also faced lack of mobility as applications with hardware requirements and limited numbers of licenses could be used only in specific laboratories. Cisco VXI has enabled SENAI/SC to reduce maintenance costs. It can now provide daily maintenance for their users, as compared to their previous monthly maintenance schedule.
In less than one year of operation, SENAI/SC realized several tangible benefits from their new virtualized environment. Easier desktop management has resulted in a drastic reduction in maintenance costs, as less time is spent on maintenance issues.
“Apart from all the benefits, the solution is environmentally friendly because it considerably reduces energy used either to power the equipment or for cooling. We obtained more than 70% savings in electricity consumption after replacing the whole traditional computer and monitor by the zero client and LED monitor,” said Claudio Farias Selau, network analyst SENAI / SC.
Cisco claims that waiting times for application installation have fallen, and applications are now available within a day. In addition, biannual maintenance processes that took months are no longer required, because the entire environment can be automatically rebuilt every week.
“The great differentiator of the adopted solution was the ability to have a great flexibility and agility in the allocation of technology resources that can really help the pedagogical project of SENAI/SC. With the virtualization SENAI/SC will have the ease and speed of deployment processes as well as the control of educational technology resources,” said Ricardo Santos, business development manager for Cisco Brazil’s Education sector.
During the first phase of the project, 325 desktops were virtualized at on SENAI/SC branches. Given the success of the operation, two more branches were virtualized, totaling 975 virtualized desktops.
The solution is based on Cisco and NetApp equipment and VMware software. TELTEC Networks, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, is the project integrator.
Other benefits include scalability of the servers that support the environment and the storage to guarantee project performance. Equipment downtime has been reduced, and equipment replacement and redistribution is much easier, as there is no storage, operating system or specific configurations.
There is no longer any need for users physically enter the laboratory to access specific applications. Now, any application can run in any classroom. It is much easier to allocate activities to specific classrooms.
