Northumbria University is keen to champion sustainable IT that can support a growing student population ­ – and to help save energy, the institution’s new campus uses a thin-client infrastructure.

City Campus East opened in 2007, and as well as using solar energy and harvesting rainwater, the university grounds are designed to accommodate increasing demand for computing resources in an environmentally-sensitive manner.

Joe Evans, technical services manager at Northumbria University, says installing a large number of PCs in public areas was not an option because of the potential for heat generation.

“I was involved in the planning stages with the architects, and thinking about energy consumption and heat generation was a very important factor,” he says.

“Heat and cooling calculations showed that we could not put in the density of IT we needed unless it was a thin client architecture, as the building would overheat unless we had the world’s biggest cooling system.”

Evans, therefore, chose to implement thin-client architecture from Wyse Technology. The thin terminals consume 14.1 watts of power, compared with the 70 to 150 watts of a standard PC.

“The approach will reduce our power bill and we are looking to reduce our energy consumption,” says Evans.

By the end of the summer Wyse terminals will comprise about a fifth ­ – 1,200 to 1,500 ­ – of the institution’s 6,000 user devices. PCs are still predominantly used by staff and in teaching laboratories.

Evans is responsible for managing the energy consumption of all IT devices in the university, and says that he needs to be proactive when considering green computing.

As part of the strategy, Evans says he would like to formalise the shutdown of PCs and networked printers at night and on weekends. “We have management software to turn off Wyse terminals, which I would like to replicate with PCs and printers,” he says.

“The institution already asks everyone to turn off their PCs, but I would like to make it mandatory and do it remotely. The capability is there, but I would need permission to do it as it would involve a change of culture.

“It would not be a case of saying people cannot turn PCs back on but they would have to wait longer for their computers or printers to warm up.”

But Evans believes that the technology management strategy will receive the green light.

“With energy prices rising and the issue of global warming, the need to conserve energy is on everyone’s minds,” he says. “And suffering two to three minutes of personal inconvenience makes sense within that context.”