The university of Pisa is one of the oldest education institutions in Italy and in the world. Its offices and departments are spread across different locations in the Tuscan capital. Recently the University found itself in the need to update its computer science environments and platforms, making them more functional and less burdensome in terms of energy consumption. One of the key challenges for the IT department was that existing PCs were quite old and required frequent maintenance and repair. Another issue was that every existing IT terminal on the premises of the University required specific access authentication, which significantly complicated the management and maintenance of end point computing devices.  

To address these challenges, the University of Pisa was looking for an IT solution that is energy efficient, easy to maintain and simplifies IT management. After a thorough consideration of all key market players and available options, the University chose NComputing’s L300 thin clients and vSpace Management Centre following the advice of their partner, the local value added distributor Horus Informatica.

The IT team deployed 100 L300 clients across the Architecture, Humanities and Computer Science departments of the university. One of the greatest advantages of the thin clients was that they offered excellent performance and flexibility at a reasonable cost and helped the university achieve its sustainability goals by dramatically cutting down energy use.  

Moreover, the vSpace software installed on the thin client devices enabled IT staff to centrally manage the clients from a signe platform, which significantly reduced Total Ownership Costs (TOC) and made IT maintenmence much easier. To find out more about this project, read the full case study here.