Businesses lift the lid on virtualisation rollouts

Citrix users spill the beans...

Businesses are increasingly working with various forms of virtualisation technology to cut costs, improve energy efficiency and simplify the management of their applications and IT services.

Virtualisation software maker Citrix held its annual UK and Ireland user conference, iForum, in Edinburgh last week and silicon.com caught up with several customers to find out how they're using the company's technology.

Reed Specialist Recruitment has had 95 per cent of its 6,000 users on Citrix's application virtualisation technology XenApp (née Citrix Presentation Server) since 2006, giving users access to applications hosted in the organisation's datacentre from their PCs.

For the remaining five per cent of Reed's staff - generally IT workers needing to update software and requiring registry access - the tech wasn't suited to their more complex needs and the company turned to Citrix's desktop virtualisation technology, XenDesktop, around six months ago.

The tech creates virtual machines in the datacentre which act as the operating system - in this case Windows XP - on thin client PCs.

Reed is now piloting the technology with around 100 users in its IT department and Sean Whetstone, head of IT services at Reed Specialist Recruitment, told silicon.com the plan is to roll out the technology to the rest of the 300 IT users by the end of the year.

"There will not be a fat PC in the [IT] organisation," he said.

All of the virtualisation work is part of an eight year project which it's estimated will see XenApp deliver around £2.9m in capital cost savings over standard PCs.

Based on the 6,000 devices that Reed runs, the total savings from reduced energy costs and hardware maintenance should also equate to around £825,000 per year or £6.6m over the eight years.

Whetstone said the main benefits of using the technology have been around security and flexibility but there have also been environmental wins from the energy savings too. "Anything where we can show the business case first and at the end say it's green, then that's great," Whetstone said.

International law firm Allen & Overy is a big user of XenApp as part of its European IT centralisation project that covers around 2,500 users.

The roll out of the technology across the company's 15 regional offices - one in each country it operates in - should be completed by the beginning of 2010 at which point the company will look at implementing XenApp in its London HQ.

For Neil Spellings, systems engineer for Allen & Overy, one of the main challenges with the deployment has been integrating the system with the differing IT infrastructures of the regional offices, which he likened to working with 15 different CIOs.

However, Spellings told silicon.com that the centrally hosted nature of the technology - which runs in the firm's UK datacentre - means new applications can be upgraded and delivered much more quickly and also reduces the need for IT support.

The set-up also makes it easier to identify where the performance issues are so they can be quickly resolved, according to Spellings. However, he added the tech has proved itself reliable - key for lawyers who charge clients by blocks of six minutes. "Uptime is actually crucial," he added.

In the public sector, Bracknell Forest Council in Berkshire has managed to reduce its IT support cost by around 20 per cent since it implemented XenApp around 18 months ago.

Ian Slee, CTO at the council, told silicon.com that it introduced the technology to facilitate flexible working. With staff now able to access applications remotely, the council has been able to reduce its office space by a quarter.

"It's given us the flexibility and cost reduction that we need. It's been a real success with us," Slee said.

The IT team is now looking to integrate more bespoke applications with XenApp, including cemetery management systems, which previously weren't compatible with the technology and are now being modified to work with it.

The council is also looking to upgrade to version 5.0 of XenApp and examining how it could benefit from using thin client PCs.

Surrey County Council was prompted to adopt virtualisation as part of an infrastructure refresh that included an SAP upgrade. A full client install of the SAP tech on individual devices would require 700MB per device so it was decided that application virtualisation would be the best way to deliver the applications.

The council, which is working with IT consultancy Centralis on the project, has so far moved around 1,000 of the council's 8,000 users move onto XenApp. It is hoped that the tech will be rolled out to the remaining 7,000 users by the end of this year.

Peter Sullivan, technical architect for the council, said the main benefits of using Citrix have been improved application performance and management, along with a reduced carbon footprint.

He added that security has also been improved as a result of the virtualisation project as data is stored in the council's datacentres rather than on individual devices.

Sullivan told silicon.com: "You're much more in control of the operating system and how people function using the Citrix technology. People can't screw things up - they can't install dodgy bits of software or viruses can't be introduced as easily. Data is less likely to be corrupted or compromised."