The radical amputation of old PCs can lead to lower administration costs and significantly lower total costs for Information Technology. This pleasant effect was experienced by the Düsseldorf-based Commerzleasing und Immobilien GmbH (Commerz Leasing and Property Ltd).

In 1998, the subsidiary company of the Commerzbank decided to procure a new company network. In the opinion of Michael Prangenberg, manager of the Information Systems and Technology department, that was absolutely necessary: the old system was still running with the uncomfortable and unstable Windows 3.11 operating system and an old version of Novell’s network software.

But above all, a whole series of applications were not 2000-compatible, in addition to which the hardware had seen better days. For the server part of the new procurement there was no alternative: since the Commerzbank parent company had already switched to Windows NT two years previously, the subsidiary followed suit.

Prangenberg adapted the cabling to the expected company growth: fast copper cables for the firm’s internal ‘Ethernet’ cabling at the head office in Düsseldorf, GSM wireless connections between the buildings located there and dedicated lines with transmission rates of 2 mbit per second for the connections to the branch offices. As far as the desks were concerned, however, besides procuring replacement PCs, a solution with ‘Thin Clients’ was discussed from the outset, i.e. with workstation terminals that retrieve their data and applications from central computers: ‘Server-based computing’.

“We didn’t particularly like the prospect of having to administrate hundreds of individual PCs with varying hardware equipment as Windows NT Clients,”

Prangenberg reports. Commerzleasing therefore decided relatively early in favour of a server-based solution with 'Citrix Metaframe' as the communication interface between the workstations and the servers. The decision wasn’t made on instinct. A rough calculation at the beginning of 1999 on the basis of 370 workstations in Düsseldorf and ten branches across Germany produced a clear result: a ‘Client/Server’ solution with Windows NT on the desktops would have cost 550,000 Euros per year for the dedicated lines, 50,000 Euros for the administration and maintenance of the system, 345,000 Euros for hotline and support costs, a quarter of a million for computing personnel and an estimated 625,000 Euros due to fault-related downtimes on the user side, as departmental and organisation manager Andreas Reuter explains. The bottom line is that it would have cost considerably more than 1.75 million Euros. The variant using Thin Clients and Citrix Metaframe, on the other hand, made do mathematically with almost 750,000 Euros – divided into 355,000 Euros for performance costs (due to the smaller bandwidth requirement), 12,500 Euros for network administration, 87,000 Euros for hotline and support, plus 175,000 Euros in personnel costs and a calculated 100,000 Euros for expected downtime.


Thin Clients at all workstations

Consequently, the Windows NT PCs were out of the running.

From May 1999, Commerzleasing began to look for the right terminals for the project. Only genuine Thin Clients were considered, no slimmed-down PCs.

Clients with proprietary, non-transferable operating systems were no alternative, likewise the slimmed-down Windows ‘CE’ variant. Ultimately Clever Clients from the Bremen-based manufacturer IGEL Technology, with its own Linux-based operating system, made the running. The slim operating system needs little space, so that a mere 16 MB flash memory suffices. Not only that, IGEL exhibited the desired degree of flexibility in configuring the hardware, according to Prangenberg.


Individual software

It additionally proved to be an advantage that the Bremenbased company has its own development department. Thanks to this, simple modifications to the operating system core could be made that put the Commerzleasing IT people in the position of also being able to offer individual software solutions to the users within the company.

The particular adaptations include a ‘spool system’, which allows printing via the terminals, and an emulation for the accounting department that runs on a server using ‘Sinix’, the Siemens variant of the Unix operating system which is related to Linux. “Besides that, we wanted the terminals to retrieve their configuration from the server at each start-up and to automatically download operating system updates where necessary,” says Prangenberg about the requirements. The first 360 Thin Clients were installed in October 1999 – department for department, whereby the change from the old to the new system took at the most three days in each case. To make the network configuration as comfortable as possible, the physical address of its network card was printed on each device for the purposes of quick identification. “Therefore it wasn’t necessary to do anything other than plug in the cables at the individual workstations,” explains Heiko Gloge, managing director of IGEL.

Acceptance of the new solution in the company was at first reserved, since the workstation computer is often perceived as ‘my computer’.

Ultimately, Commerzleasing made it easier for the employees to say goodbye to the old junk by replacing the gigantic CRT monitors with the smart flat-screen monitors that now stand on every desk – and take up less space. At the same time as the elegant hardware and new applications, for example the communication-promoting groupware ‘Lotus Notes’, the employees also got e-mail and internet connections. Despite these new possibilities, organisation boss Reuter sums up, the central structure means that administration costs have not risen.


www.igel.com