Tech Success: Knowledge Is Power

In the summer of 2012, TechWeekEurope launched the Tech Success Awards to celebrate IT projects that exceed expectations and make a difference.

Now, it is time to find more about the winners. The award for the best “green” IT project of 2011-2012 went to Cadoxton Primary School in South Wales, for deploying a full classroom of virtual desktops powered by solar panels.

Working with Sheffield-based Solar Ready, Janet Hayward (pictured), head teacher at the school, was keen to increase access to computing to improve learning, as well as reduce costs. The resulting low energy system produces no noise, no heat, but still runs all the necessary applications with a look and feel of Windows 7.

Registration for this year’s Tech Success Awards is open, and we have added an extra category for security projects. So if your business has recently accomplished a feat of IT engineering, we want to know!

Extra skinny desktop

A hundred computers at Caldoxton Primary are fully powered by renewable energy generated by four solar panels mounted inside the windows. To achieve this, the school had installed zero-client desktops that require just 12V of DC power each. The virtual machines are deployed by using Microsoft Multipoint Server 2011 in combination with Solar Ready host server that takes care of all processing, networking and application needs.

The host server can manage all of the connected machines, project content onto an interactive whiteboard, and allow the teacher to monitor individual screens.

Solar Ready technology allows the energy to be stored and distributed to all devices in the system, resulting in a “very efficient, quiet, cool, spacious, user friendly ICT suite” that runs on free electricity at £250 a seat.

To see how this unusual set-up works, watch the video below:

We congratulate the team at Caldoxton Primary on their Tech Success!

You can read about other Tech Success winners:

• The most successful public sector IT project: Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust
• The most successful Cloud project: Orbian
• The most innovative IT project: Jaguar Land Rover

Do you know all about Green IT? Take our quiz!