Our customers - technological references

ČEPS, a.s.

ČEPS is responsible for the operation and development of transmission system facilities in the Czech Republic, as well as for parallel operation with the power systems of neighbouring countries via cross-border tie-lines under UCTE rules. The principles of ČEPS activities in its capacity as the operator of the transmission system, a natural monopoly, are set out in the Grid Code which is in line with Directive 96/92/EC.

ČEPS is a licensed Czech transmission system operator according to the provisions of Act No. 458/2000 Coll. The Company provides safe and reliable electricity transmission for users of the Czech transmission system within European interconnected power systems.

The aim of the solution was to implement a graphical user interface for end users that would enable them run applications from their desktops by clicking on links, and limit the number of approved tools. It was requested that this method facilitates execution of remote applications that would run on remote QNX servers.

Execution of either local or native applications on remote servers with the same operating system can be achieved by many means. Communication and displaying is based on the X protocol. The preferred method is to use the SF Raydesk Remote Executor which is an agent running on a remote system as a service, or executed by the inetd network super daemon in an on-demand mode. Upon starting this type of application, a client side of the SF Raydesk Remote Executor is activated which executes the application and redirects its graphical output to the network.

Grid for Wood Science Institute at Mendel University of Agriculture and Forestry in Brno

Mendel University of Agriculture and Forestry in Brno can pride itself on the longest history of agriculture and forestry studies in the Czech lands. It was established in 1919 as the University of Agriculture in Brno and it kept this name till 1994. Its constitution completed a longterm effort to institute an agricultural university in Moravia, which has, from of old, held an important place among countries with the most developed agricultures in Central Europe.

The entire computing node is now ready to take over existing insufficient computing power for scientific computations on distributed computing nodes. The number of nodes will be gradually increased by adding entire servers or cores and CPU's along with RAM to individual computing nodes. According to InfoWorld, the supplied Sun Fire X4600 server is the best High-Performance server of 2007. On the side of end-users the cost savings were related not only to energy but mainly to centralised administration. Disparate workstations and high cost of maintaining individual PC's have been replaced by Sun Ray virtual display terminals.

SFZP ČR

The State Environmental Fund of the Czech Republic is a special-purpose institution serving as an important financial source for the support of measures aimed at the protection and improvement of the environment. The Fund is one of essential economic instruments used to fulfill obligations arising from international conventions on environmental protection and membership in the European Union. It is also an instrument used to implement the National Environmental Policy. The Fund employs approximately 150 persons.

During the second phase the infrastructure required for step by step replacement of PC's by Sun Ray thin clients has been created. The organisation uses a large number of applications that are only available for the MS Windows platform (some of them tailored for SFŽP use). MS Windows 2003 servers were prepared for this reason to function as terminal servers running these applications. It is possible to access these applications remotely through the Citrix Presentation Server.

The Sun Ray thin clients were first controlled by a Sun Fire V800 server running Solaris and then by a Sun Fire X2100 server farm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. Controlled user access to applications is provided by the Raydesk 2.0 desktop environment. Raydesk is built upon a centralised data warehouse that has multiple copies and back-ups within the infrastructure.

Occupational Safety Research Institute

The Occupational Safety Research Institute (VÚBP) is a public research institution (v.v.i.) founded by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic. For over 50 years, its main activities have been scientific research, verification and application of methods and means in the area of risk prevention relating to health or life impairment of persons, the environment and patrimony, relating to work activities and improving well-being at work and as well as quality of working life. The Institute is a member of several important international organisations and associations such as WSO or PEROSH, participates in EUROSHNET and is a partner to ENETOSH.

The proposed solution is based on a centralised configuration of networking parameters with the help of the DHCP protocol. The DHCP runs on a supplied Sun Fire X2100 server with an AMD Opteron CPU. There is also a controller server for the Sun Ray ultra-thin clients running on the same machine. The ultra-thin clients are located at the central office. Others are at the branches and connected through ADSL and VPN.

All system resource requirements are limited to fail-over controlling servers that service the Sun Ray 270 and Sun Ray 2 clients with built-in LCD's. As opposed to Citrix-based terminals or HP and IBM solutions, adding applications in user profiles will not increase RAM and CPU requirements.