Soon we may see this as an entry in the book of Guinness World Records: The world's largest single desktop virtualization and Linux deployment now belongs to Canada's Userful and Brazil's ThinNetworks, which hooked up to install a whopping 356,800 green workstations in schools in all 5,560 municipalities in Brazil.
The previous record -- that the Station knew of, anyway -- was 180,000 Macedonian workstations in 2008, installed by NComputing, of Redwood City, Calif.
Desktop virtualization can save capital and reduce carbon footprints at the same time. Userful's ability to turn one computer into 10 independent workstations will save the Brazilian government an estimated 60 percent in up-front costs and 80 percent in annual power savings as compared with a traditional PC-per-workstation solution, the companies said.
It will also save more than 170,000 tons of Co2 emissions annually -- about the same as taking 28,000 cars off the road or planting 41,000 acres of trees.
Good stuff. Brazil's already lost a large amount of rain forest, so this is one way to give back to the environment.