NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. – The concept of “green” computing will not be widely accepted if IT administrators and desktop users have to pay too big a price to save money and the environment say Gideon Romm and Roger Del Russo, co-founders of stateless computing leader Symbio Technologies, a pioneer and innovator in the greening of IT.

What’s more, Romm and Del Russo readily admit that achieving economic and ecological benefits for businesses was not a priority in their original business plan.

“Truth be told, we didn’t set out to be ‘Ben and Jerry’,” said Romm, who met and formed an alliance with Del Russo while the two were working for a New Jersey-based tech company in the late 1990’s. “What Symbio (www.symbio-technologies.com) set out to do – and did – was change how businesses, government, schools and other distributed computing environments view and use desktop computers after doing it basically just one way in the 26 years since IBM introduced its Personal Computer.”

The Symbio solution – in use around the world – consists of small, inexpensive diskless thin clients linked to the server by the Symbiont boot appliance. “This approach creates an environmentally-friendly, cost-effective solution that represents the future of computing,” said Del Russo, noting that “Symbio provides a data-secure environment with desktop devices that have no moving parts to break, do not make noise or create heat and use less energy running than PC’s do when turned off (and plugged in).”

Romm said that “Symbio’s mantra is a secure, data-free desktop. But now, as green has turned to gold for smart IT companies and their customers, businesses see diskless computing with our solution as a way to save significantly on their power consumption, on their desktop end-of-life costs, and on their need to dispose of obsolete computers, all of which adds up to dollars on the bottom line and ecological benefits as well.”

Del Russo agrees . . . and then some. “In a nutshell,” he said, “Symbio enables excellence. We save energy, boost an organization’s economic outlook, and help the environment while letting everyone in the enterprise work on all the same applications and at the same speeds as their wasteful, old-fashioned friends laboring on costly, energy-consuming and non-secure PC’s.”

‘The Quest for Green Gravy’

“Being green is great, but not if the green system doesn’t get the original job done,” said Romm. “Technology must be efficient and secure, helping an organization simplify its networks and safeguard its data. Then, and only then,” he said, “should we install a system that can also save money and is kind to the environment.

“If this were a video game,” added Del Russo, “it could be called ‘The Quest for Green Gravy,’ because the basics must be handled first while everything else, including the greening of IT, is, in a word, ‘gravy’.”

Romm said that one of the keys to being “successfully green” is that the technology must provide real benefits to the network without disrupting how users get their work done.

“Diskless desktop devices must seamlessly support Windows Terminal Services and popular platforms and applications,” said Del Russo. “If you don’t give the people what they want, even if your idea or product is better, it may well die on the vine.”

“The Symbio approach,” said Romm, “is designed to support Windows, Open software, and other operating systems and applications while securing the desktop, running at the speed of the server, and saving money and the environment along with way.”

“Gideon and I may be more like Ben and Jerry than we ever thought,” mused Del Russo. “They used imagination to create ice cream that people love, and we’ve created a ‘cone’ that supports the many flavors of computing. And we don’t even have to wipe our chins when we log-off!”

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