Aqua Connect allows them to create a workstation environment running Mac OS X on their Sun Ray Thin Clients
United Christian Church of Dubai wanted to provide a workstation environment for machines with a “hot-desk” solution running Mac OS X. They were able to accomplish this by using Aqua Connect Terminal Server. An alternative option they considered was to buy Mac Minis and use roaming user profiles. It would have achieved the same main goals but required a lot more workstation management. Since simplifying management time was a primary concern, Aqua Connect became their best choice.
They installed Aqua Connect on their Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.5.8 server. Their server hardware has a 2 x 2.6 Quad Core Xeon Processor with 12 GB of memory. In addition to ACTS, they have also loaded Sun’s Virtual Box (running Windows 2008 and Solaris 10) on the hardware. They connect to the server with Sun Ray 2 machines as their clients. Most of their users exclusively use Mail, Safari and iWork (Pages and Numbers). They have some advanced users who also occasionally use Photoshop and other Adobe CS4 products. Other users run Microsoft Word and Excel for Mac OS, but these are generally for legacy documents and spreadsheets.
With only a single server to manage, they are experiencing significant time-savings in terms of hardware management. For anticipated cost-savings, they wanted a solution with long-term viability which Mac terminal services provided. With Aqua Connect Terminal Server, they can use the Sun Rays for the next 10 years without needing to upgrade them. They expect that this will be an environment that will be in use for a long time. The Church has begun to plan for future Aqua Connect implementations including the possibility of doing their work “in the cloud”, so all they will have to do is simply publish a browser to each user on the Sun Rays.
They are also investigating the possibility of allowing remote access to users working from home using the RDP clients they prefer. They see the ACTS solution benefiting other areas of their organization’s IT infrastructure by creating an ease of management in terms of workstations and software upgrades. The ability of shadowing user sessions is also of keen interest. It would allow for training users on software as they run it and/or addressing user support issues while they are happening.
“Aqua Connect Terminal Server has allowed us to harness the low maintenance “hotdesking” terminal server solutions offered by Sun Rays with the stability and ease of use of Mac OS X.”
