Florida Atlantic University Invests In Zero Clients to Keep Up with Computer Use, Cut Energy Costs

“[For example,] if they’re saving 150 watts per desktop over an eight hour day, that’s a little more than one kilowatt hour per day,” he says. “The energy costs on average are about 12 cents per kilowatt hour, commercial prices. That’s roughly saving about 15 cents per day per desktop, which, over the course of 250 days, that’s about 35 dollars a year per desktop. If you’re saving $100,000 per year, that’s pretty significant.”

Aside from significant savings, Mauser says the zero clients easily connect with the university’s private Cloud network, and enables students to log in and access their lab work anytime, anywhere.

“You literally take the zero client out of the box and within two minutes, it’s connected to our server,” he says. “It pushes out a profile to it and the student logs in. A lab can be set up no matter where I need it to be as long as I have network and power.”

Jason Webster, Regional Business Manager for ViewSonic says this capability grants students more mobility, and reduces the amount of time it took for them to wait for a lab computer to open up.

“The student can go to any lab with their username and ID, and log on and not have to bring a PC,” he says. “So they can come a little lighter to the class without all this technology. They can just log in and there’s their desktop – all the programs and everything that’s assigned to them based on the courseware they’re studying during that semester. It helps students become more efficient and not have to wait for labs or PCs to be open.”

Mauser says the zero clients also create better, cleaner resolution. He says they give students a cleaner visualization experience when they watch videos for class.

“Because [the zero clients] use PCOIP technology, the display is so much better,” Mauser says. “That PCOIP encrypts and compresses the signal from the server to the end point, and the end point changes the pixels. So you really see the resolution in quick timing.