The eThekwini (Durban) municipality has completed a R4 million thin client computer roll-out in a bid to improve services and reduce costs.
The project, designed and implemented by Pan-African systems integrator Intrinsic Technologies, saw ailing green screens and desktop PCs replaced by an HP and NCD thin client infrastructure.
"We manage the billing of rates and taxes, water and electricity usage, to approximately 550 000 households and more than three million citizens," says Lunga Madlala, deputy head of IT and e-government at eThekwini municipality. "A combination of custom-developed and off-the-shelf packages is used to control these processes, the majority of which run off an IBM OS/390 mainframe and AS/400 mid-range server."
Until now, these applications have been accessed using a combination of green screen mainframe terminals and PCs. The problem facing eThekwini was the cost and hassle of maintaining the PCs, and the challenge of giving green screen users access to more functionality. The municipality also found it increasingly difficult to obtain parts for the green screens.
This, combined with the city`s decision to standardise on Internet Protocol, resulted in the decision to go the thin client route.
"The essence of thin clients is that they have no moving parts. They look and feel like a normal PC but all storage, processing and control of the desktop takes place at the central server point - only minimal amounts of data are transferred over the network," says Bill Kenton, a senior account manager at Intrinsic Technology.
"In the case of eThekwini, approximately 400 NCD thin clients have been deployed across the municipality departments. Users log onto the mainframe and/or the HP servers via a Web portal and the familiar Windows environment is visually replicated on the screen.
"The mainframe and the AS/400 continue to host the bespoke applications and the JD Edwards ERP. Other applications - such as the office productivity and communication programs - are hosted on six new HP midrange servers."
"IT support costs have been dramatically reduced since no dedicated resources are required to support the new environment," says Madlala. "We also expect users to be less reliant on the IT department. It has also improved the services we can offer citizens, because we can access multiple databases and applications via the same front-end."
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