Monday September 21, 2009
Monday September 21, 2009
Gebeco migrates to Sun Ray, saves on energy costs
Gebeco, a leading travel operator for study and general group tours, specializes in high-end adventure holidays and educational travel around the world including South America, South Africa, China, and the entire Far East. The company, based in Kiel, Germany, is responsible for the travel brands Gebeco Länder erleben, Dr. Tigges, and goXplore, and serves 70,000 travelers each year. Gebeco uses its own internally-developed reservation system for bookings, which is based on the OS/2 operating system. |
 (Image courtesy: Gebeco) |
| However,
this infrastructure build
recently became a problem because the productivity solutions Gebeco
used were effectively obsolete with the OS/2 operating system, and
new programs, such as OpenOffice, that the company wanted to
introduce were no longer supported on OS/2. Rewriting the reservation
software for a new operating system would have been too expensive, so
Gebeco searched for a solution that would allow the company to
continue using its OS/2 software programs while simultaneously
introducing new systems and applications. Gebeco ultimately decided on the VirtualBox emulator from Sun, which not only allowed the company to integrate OS/2 software with new systems, but also gave them the opportunity to migrate from PCs to thin clients. Gebeco is now conducting operations on 200 Sun Ray 2 Virtual Display Clients along with two Sun Ray 2FS Virtual Display Clients for developers. Gebeco also implemented both the Sun Ray Server Software 4.1 and the applications on four Sun Fire X4440 Servers and two Sun Fire X4150 Servers. The primary benefits to the new solution are the power and cost savings. The new infrastructure has reduced electricity consumption significantly and is saving the business €7,000 a year. Additionally, the horizontally scaled computer farm can be easily expanded with another machine without any difficulty. Noise reduction is another added benefit, as Thomas Schönemann, IT manager at Gebeco observed “it is much quieter now,” also noting “the buildup of heat is much lower.” Schönemann also praised the reduction in maintenance time stating: “It now takes minutes to do what took hours before.” Check out the complete details here. |
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