A Pano cube attached to the back of a monitor at Frisco Public Library. The new technology helps save both space and energy. Image: friscogreenliving.com.

By Bill Sullivan

If you have paid a visit to the Computer Lab at Frisco Public Library over the last year or so, you probably noticed some changes.

It’s cooler. (Literally.)  Quieter, too. You may even have taken note of a lot more leg room under the tables now that those space-eating, noise-making, heat-producing Central Processing Units are mostly a thing of the past. (A few remain for training purposes.)

“The lab was a very noisy place, needless to say, with 30 some-odd computers whirring along and fans running everywhere,” Library Systems Coordinator Gary Werchan says. “Now, as you can hear, that’s clearly no longer the case.

“You can barely hear a pin drop in here some days. It’s a lot more pleasant environment to work in than it was before.”

Pano cubes take the place of CPUs without any reduction in user functionality. Image: friscogreenliving.com.

Credit this to some clever use of about $83,000, part of an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) the City of Frisco received from the federal government to help make the Library and other public spaces more energy efficient. In addition to the obvious aesthetic improvements, replacing CPUs (which use about 120 watts of power) with small black boxes called Pano Zero Client cubes (about five watts) is expected to save about $3,000 a year, according to Enterprise Technology and Infrastructure Manager Tim Yarbrough. During the hotter months of the year, the new equipment, produced by Pano Logic of Redwood City, Calif., should help reduce cooling costs as well.

“We talked about ways of improving energy efficiency at the Library,” Yarbrough explains. “Basically, we replaced 85 desktop systems with a zero client virtual desktop environment. It essentially takes the physical PC away and replaces it with a small black box.

“That cube gives you a presentation where you get your video, your keyboard and your mouse inter-activity, but the actual computer you are accessing is in the server room, running on a couple of servers and some storage.”

The Pano cubes are easily attached to the back of each monitor, conserving surface space. The setup includes the network cable, USB cables for mouse and keyboard, a video port and audio out for headphones.

How does it all work?

“Essentially, this little box talks to the server and has its own dedicated machine that it’s tied to,” Yarbrough says. “The user logs into this environment. They can interact with it, and when they’re done and they shut it down, that server on the back end – the actual virtual computer — restarts itself.

“Any changes done in that environment are lost, because it’s a non-persistent state. When it reboots, it loses that state and comes back up to the way it was originally and is ready for another user to log in.”

That feature provides much needed security, always an issue for a publicly-shared system. Yet another part of the attraction of the Pano cube: The user experience is pretty much identical to working with a desktop unit with a conventional CPU.

Asked how patrons have reacted, Werchan said the transition was virtually seamless.

“People for the most part were pretty much… unaffected,” he said.  “They carried on about their normal business.”

In addition to saving space and cutting down electricity usage, Pano cubes reduce maintenance costs. Image: friscogreenliving.com

From the maintenance perspective, however, the move to the Pano cube represents a dramatic change. Updates and repairs that previously were done on station-to-station basis have been centralized.

“The systems we had were old and needed to be replaced,” Yarbrough says. “From a repair perspective, we were replacing fans and other things on a regular basis.

“All these systems are housed on the server. If we need to make updates, we can take the system down and update directly there. They’re available the next day, as opposed to running around from this machine to that one.”

Original designs planned for 100 machines to run on the two servers. Currently, about 85 machines are operating throughout the Library, leaving room for expansion. The new technology is designed to be around for a while, too.

“The longevity on these should be much greater,” Yarbrough says. “There’s no reason you couldn’t maintain these for seven, eight years, maybe longer.”

Cooler, quieter,  more energy efficient – and essentially free. It’s another win-win for the city, making the Frisco Public Library an even more pleasant and environmentally friendly place to be.