Justification for Enterprise SBC


"MetaFrame grew from a remote access solution for a few employees to a key component of Lehman's enterprise infrastructure. By proving its scalability, performance, and flexibility under extraordinary circumstances, MetaFrame became an integral part of our IT strategy going forward."

—Hari Gopalkrishnan, Vice President E-Commerce Technology, Lehman Brothers

No company would transform itself into an "on-demand enterprise" because it's a cool phrase or a hot technology. There must be pain; that pain must be acute, and there must be a viable solution that can stop the pain. The pain many companies are feeling is the cost of IT complexity—80 percent of the typical IT budget today goes to just maintaining existing systems—combined with the inability of an increasingly remote and mobile workforce to access enterprise information where and when they need it. Migrating to server-based computing from a client-centric model simplifies complexity, consolidates hardware and software systems, cuts costs and increases access. This is the first step in becoming an on-demand enterprise where the IT staff is in control, information is available on demand, and the business can do much more with much less.

Economic Savings of SBC

Implementing an enterprise SBC environment is not inexpensive. In addition to the licenses, hardware, design, planning and implementation costs, SBC also requires a more robust data-center architecture than that of a distributed PC-based computing model. Nonetheless, an SBC environment is a much more economical alternative.

In an enterprise SBC architecture, the majority of resources are no longer expended on peripheral devices such as PCs and remote office servers and networks. Information processing, servers, and data are consolidated to central data center(s) where resources are much more effectively deployed. Wayne Patterson, chairman of Vector ESP, refers to this as achieving "economies of skills" because organizations can utilize a much smaller number of competent IT staff to manage their entire IT infrastructures.

Consolidating servers and storage to a central data center can significantly reduce expenditures on hardware and associated maintenance. Moreover, the process of centralization provides the architecture and economies to utilize more efficient types of storage such as network attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) devices. It also enables more efficient and economical implementation of software products such as AppSense and PowerFuse, which control what applications users are able to launch.

Personal Computers Personal computers tend to have a maximum life span of only a few years for most organizations. Upgrading a PC is an expensive task that includes not only the cost of the machine and its operating system software, but also the expense of ordering, delivering, and configuring the PC. Data files often need transferring from the old unit to the new one, and the user suffers from downtime during the process. In an on-demand enterprise, personal computers typically no longer require upgrading since the applications are processed on central server farms. New users can often utilize inexpensive Windows terminals that are set up in minutes. Suppose, for example, that an organization normally replaces 2000 PCs every three years at a cost of $1100 each (including sales tax, procurement costs, installation, travel, and data transfer costs). By eliminating the refresh cycle requirement, SBC enables savings of $2.2M in capital expenditures every three years for such an organization. Chapter 7 and Appendix B both describe other costs associated with PC refresh cycles.

Our estimates had indicated expenses of over two million dollars to replace old hardware in Canada. By leveraging existing hardware with Citrix, we completed the whole project in Canada for only $400,000, saving the company more than $1.5 million.

—Louis Gilbert, Director of Data Center Operations, Air Liquide America

Homogenizing Clients Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server lets users run the latest Microsoft applications utilizing a wide variety of clients including Macs, most types of UNIX, Linux, many handheld devices, smart phones, DOS, all flavors of Windows, and even OS/2.

Fewer Laptops Many organizations give employees laptops primarily to work between the office and their homes, or between remote offices. Because of higher up-front costs, higher failure rates, much higher maintenance costs, and lack of upgradeability, laptops cause a disproportionate amount of trouble and expense (relative to a desktop PC) to IT departments.

In an on-demand enterprise, users see their personalized desktop and its applications no matter where they connect or which device they use. Thus, companies frequently avoid some of the expense of laptops by simply purchasing a Windows terminal for their employees to use at home. Employees can also access their applications through a browser from their own PC or from most Internet kiosks, further driving down the need for laptops. Only the truly disconnected worker needs a laptop, and with the new wireless WAN solutions offered by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and others, the disconnected worker will quickly become ancient history.

Administration

Thin continues to be in. A study by Gartner Group's Datapro unit has found that enterprises that have deployed networks based on thin clients...tend to extend those installations to other parts of the enterprise. "The staffing required to support fat client PCs is at least five times greater than for Windows terminals of PCs that are configured as Windows terminals," said Peter Lowber, the Datapro analyst who authored the report.

InternetWeek, June 1, 1999

Since administration is the largest component of a PC's total cost of ownership, SBC saves organizations huge amounts of money by reducing IT staffing requirements. This comes primarily from the elimination of the requirement to push new applications to desktops. For example, Wayne Dodrill, Manager of Systems Integration for Concentra Health, a U.S. leader in occupational health care, noted that "Citrix access infrastructure solutions have helped us double our sites served, quadruple our applications deployed, triple our users, and reduce our help desk from 17 to seven—all while raking in an annual savings of over one million dollars in reduced hardware and bandwidth costs."

Note

ABM Industries is a Fortune 1000 company discussed later in this chapter that migrated entirely to a Citrix access infrastructure model. Prior to implementing SBC, the IT staff presented three alternative scenarios for migrating the company's 2500 Lotus Notes users around the country from R4 to R5:

  • Scenario a) 24 months and $3.0M

  • Scenario b) 18 months and $3.5M

  • Scenario c)9 months and $4.5M

After migrating company-wide to SBC, the actual time to upgrade to Notes R5 was only 18 hours with no added cost.

Maintenance The ability to eliminate user-caused problems such as loading misbehaving software applications or deleting icons results in greatly reduced PC maintenance expenses. When a PC breaks, it can often simply be replaced with an inexpensive Windows terminal.

Help Desk Support The shadowing feature of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server typically enables fewer help desk staff to accomplish more through their ability to instantly and interactively "see" the user's screen. They can then provide remote support by taking control of the user's screen, mouse, and keyboard.

Help Desk Staffing Password-related help desk calls account for nearly 25% of call volume on average, and businesses spend on average $200 per year per person on password management, including maintaining help desks that reset lost passwords. Citrix Password Manager eliminates the requirement for users to remember multiple passwords and therefore dramatically reduces the necessity for help desk intervention.

Help Desk Delays Organizations often document the cost of providing help desk support. However, they seldom quantify the cost of lost productivity as users struggle to fix a problem themselves or wait for the help desk to handle it. Users too impatient or embarrassed to contact the help desk may waste other employees' time by requesting their assistance. SBC results in less user downtime by combining reduced hardware problems with easier and more effective access to help desk support.

Conferencing Popular Web-based conferencing services commonly charge fees ranging between 25 to 50 cents per user per minute, which can easily run up expenses totaling thousands of dollars per month. Citrix Conferencing Manager enables real-time application sharing for both internal and external users, but at a one-time fixed fee. Therefore, the annual savings can be extraordinary, with a payback period often of only a month or two.

With session shadowing, we've been able to dramatically improve technical support for our users, and have improved response times to their requests by 90 percent.

—Patricia E. Plonchak, Senior VP and Director of Technology, Hudson Valley Bank

Employee Productivity Work often stops when personal computers or applications are upgraded, repaired, or rebuilt. Incompatible software can require time-intensive repairs caused from DLL file and registry conflicts. Moreover, incompatible software versions sometimes require time-consuming data conversions to enable information-sharing among employees. On-demand enterprise users always have access to the latest application versions—standardized across the enterprise—from any device.

Training Costs The resource-intensive logistics of a distributed PC architecture often limits an organization's ability to provide training on new applications or application upgrades, particularly to remote offices. MetaFrame XP Presentation Server's one-to-many shadowing feature enables remote training sessions for users throughout the enterprise. Users can shadow the instructor's machine while simultaneously participating in a conference call. This lowers the cost for training, meaning users can become more proficient and, thus, productive, reducing their requirement for application-based help-desk assistance.

Electricity Windows terminals tend to use only about 1/7th of the electricity of PCs. In states such as California with high electricity costs, the savings can run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for organizations with large quantities of PCs. Eliminating remote office servers can further reduce power requirements.

Eliminating the Need for Local Data Backup Many organizations rely on users and on remote office administrators to do their own data backups, or they contract this function out to third-party services. SBC eliminates the time, risk, and expense associated with distributed data backups.

Remote Office Infrastructures

In a PC-based computing environment, even small remote offices often require not only domain controllers and file servers, but also e-mail servers, database servers, and possibly other application servers such as fax servers. An example of a PC-based computing environment in a remote office is shown in Figure 1-2. The remote offices also require associated peripheral software and hardware including network operating systems software, tape backups, tape backup software, antivirus software, network management software, and uninterruptible power supplies. Someone needs to administer and maintain these remote networks as well as ensure that data is consistently synchronized or replicated with data at headquarters.

click to expand
Figure 1-2: A typical remote office in a PC-based computing environment

In an on-demand enterprise, remote office servers and their peripherals can usually be eliminated entirely by running all users as clients to a central server farm. Both powerful and low-end PCs, Windows terminals, Macintoshes, and UNIX workstations can be cabled to a low-bandwidth hub and then connected with a router to the corporate data center through a leased line, frame relay cloud, or through the Internet utilizing the secure gateway component of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server or of a VPN product. Figure 1-3 shows a typical small remote office utilizing an on-demand enterprise with server-based computing.

click to expand
Figure 1-3: A typical office utilizing enterprise server-based computing

Naturally, when the remote office servers and associated network infrastructures are eliminated, the corresponding support and maintenance costs are eliminated as well. Suppose, for example, an organization spends $17,000 every three years on upgrading each server in a remote office (including associated software, UPS, tape backup, travel time, network reconfiguration, and troubleshooting). These are fairly typical numbers. Suppose this company also spends $3000 per server per year in administration costs and $2000 per server per year in on-going maintenance. If there are 100 remote offices with an average of three servers per office, the company would then save $3,200,000 every three years just in remote office network expenses by migrating to SBC.

Remote Office Bandwidth It is not uncommon for an ERP package such as JD Edwards' One World to require 128KB of bandwidth or more per user, making it very expensive to connect remote office users in a PC-based computing environment. An on-demand enterprise utilizing Microsoft Terminal Services and MetaFrame XP Presentation Server requires only 10KB to 20KB of bandwidth per concurrent user. Rather than building a local area network (LAN) infrastructure at each remote office necessitating data replication with headquarters, the low bandwidth requirements enable remote office users to simply run all of their applications from the corporate data center. The secure gateway component of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server (similar to VPN solutions, though significantly lower in cost) enables employees to use the Internet as an even less-expensive bandwidth medium for enabling SBC.

Topologies

Fat-client PCs increasingly require faster LAN bandwidth of 100MB or even gigabit switching to every desktop. Users of PCs and Windows terminals operating in an SBC environment see only low-bandwidth screen prints. Although a fast server backbone is a must, legacy topologies of older 10MB Ethernet can typically continue to be used to connect client workstations with no degradation in performance.

Windows Server 2003 Migration

An on-demand enterprise simplifies Active Directory design and implementation by eliminating some, or all, of the requirement for remote office domain controllers. The MetaFrame Access Suite enables organizations to present the same Windows or browser interface to users as they would see when running Windows XP locally. Organizations can essentially upgrade all of their users to Windows XP without upgrading (and in some cases without even touching) a single desktop. Migrating to Windows Server 2003 within an SBC architecture is covered more thoroughly in Chapter 20.

Exchange 2003 Migration

Why would anyone ever deploy Exchange 2003 in any other manner than through SBC? Eliminating the requirement for remote office Exchange servers and the associated replication with headquarters slashes design, hardware, and implementation costs while enabling all workers across the enterprise to utilize a centralized Exchange server (or clustered servers) in the data center. This centralized deployment strategy lends itself to offering richer services to users such as Instant Messenger or Conferencing Server that are more challenging to deploy in a distributed fashion.

Network Management

Organizations often seek to simplify the complexity of distributing applications to desktops by utilizing management software programs. These packages, though, besides their tendency to be expensive, come with their own significant administrative headaches. They also typically lack the capability to distribute certain applications such as new operating systems. In the end, they remain dependent upon the memory and processing capabilities of the individual PCs as being sufficient to adequately run the new applications.

An on-demand enterprise requires no desktop distribution of hosted applications. The shift in emphasis from the desktop to the data center in turn simplifies asset management. It is also much easier to track true IT expenses because they are no longer hidden in various cost centers such as individual expense accounts and remote office contractor costs.

The administration tools of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enable administrators to produce reports showing application usage by user, including the time online as well as server resources consumed. This information helps facilitate compliance with federal regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley by providing an audit trail. It can also potentially reduce licensing fees for some software manufacturers. Network management is covered in Chapter 9.

Major Business Benefits of SBC

Beyond the economic savings provided by SBC, migrating to an on-demand enterprise enables a myriad of other benefits that enable organizations to conduct their business operations both more effectively and efficiently.

Application Deployment

The ability to rapidly deploy applications to all users on a wide variety of devices throughout the enterprise enables organizations to respond faster to their customers or bring new products to market more quickly.

Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server and Microsoft Windows Terminal Services enabled us to reduce our transaction time for our primary advertising order entry application from minutes to seconds for our remote users. Furthermore, Citrix allowed us to quickly extend our headquarters' IT capabilities to our remote offices for a fraction of the cost required if we had chosen an alternative deployment method.

—Jonathan Hiller, CIO, San Francisco Chronicle

Today, we are seeing popular applications similarly driving the march into enterprise SBC. An organization's existing PCs, for example, may be inadequate to run a ubiquitous application such as Office 2003. Rather than spending the huge money and labor required to upgrade or replace existing PCs, an organization can implement MetaFrame XP Presentation Server and simply publish the Office 2003 icon to all users. If a transition is required, two different Office version icons can be published to users simultaneously.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Resource Management (CRM) applications, such as those offered by SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel, are deployed much less expensively and more effectively in an on-demand enterprise. This was the case for California's Contra Costa County. When the Department of Information Technology received a mandate to implement PeopleSoft for the county's 360 human resources (HR) users, the county was faced with replacing many dumb terminals and upgrading most of the remaining PCs. They also would have had to undergo expensive bandwidth upgrades to 60 different buildings. The county instead set up a MetaFrame XP Presentation Server farm to deploy PeopleSoft, Kronos Time & Billing, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, and other applications to all HR users without requiring any PC or bandwidth upgrades. "My concern is lowering our cost of administration while providing a high level of performance and service to our customers," explained John Forberg, Deputy CIO of Contra Costa County. "Thanks to Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server and Microsoft Terminal Server, we save about 180 hours of IT staff time each time we update our PeopleSoft application."

Universal Access The web interface component of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enables information, via both web and Windows applications, to be delivered through a browser-based interface. It gives users access to all of the information and applications that they need to execute their job responsibilities. This single point of access, and the bringing together of information in new ways, enables users to work smarter and faster, and make better, more informed decisions. MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enables users to enjoy the rich-client interfaces native to their applications delivered over the Web, and integrated with the other resources that they need. The web interface implementation is covered in Chapter 16.

Single Point Access to Multiple Server Farms The web interface extension component of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enables highly scalable application provisioning by aggregating application sets from multiple farms and multiple domains. Users need to authenticate with ID and password only once to access both MetaFrame XP Presentation Server for Windows and MetaFrame Presentation Server for UNIX applications from multiple server farms. This topic is covered more thoroughly in Chapter 16.

Collaboration The delegated administration features of MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enable users, no matter where they are located, to work together on documents with different access rights depending upon their authorization. A sales manager, for example, might collaborate with a networking consultant and a salesperson to finish up a Word document late at night when all three are working from home.

Citrix MetaFrame Conferencing Manager is an enhanced collaboration tool that adds intuitive application conferencing to the MetaFrame XP Presentation Server. It enables teams to share application sessions, work together on document editing, and conduct online training regardless of the location of individual team members or the access devices or network connections they're using.

Embracing Corporate Standards With SBC, control of the desktop shifts from the user to the IT staff, making it relatively effortless to implement corporate software standards. This reduces inefficiencies resulting from data-sharing problems and helps prevent duplication of work. It also enables IT to present a common user interface, whether Windows- or browser-based.

Unlicensed Software The difficulty of preventing unlicensed software use in a PC-based computing environment can expose an organization to large fines because of the difficulty of preventing unlicensed software use. Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enables organizations to monitor application usage by employee.

Eliminating Games and Other Personal Programs If desired, IT can completely eliminate the ability to load games or other productivity-sapping personal programs.

Reducing Virus Risk Eliminating or restricting users' ability to add software via their local floppy or onto their local hard drive means that the network antivirus software should eliminate most computer virus problems. Centralizing all access into the network enables IT to implement products such as AppSense that can virtually eliminate the threat of macro viruses. This topic is discussed more thoroughly as part of Chapter 8 on security.

Helping to Prevent Theft of Intellectual Property Since users see only screen prints of data, IT can more easily prevent employees from copying corporate information files. This can be important in staffing industries, for example, where applicant databases constitute the company assets and are frequent targets of theft by dishonest employees.

Eliminating the PC as a Status Symbol Identical performance for everyone means that the PC loses its value as an organizational status symbol. The personal computer becomes the corporate computer. This eliminates the common, and very inefficient, tendency to shuffle PCs between users as new units are introduced. As a sense of entitlement to PCs is replaced by ubiquitous access to a personalized desktop, productivity replaces time-wasting bickering and PC redeployment.

Remote Office Connectivity

As a community bank, it is imperative for us to offer superb customer service at all locations. Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server enables our employees at the branches to utilize our sophisticated systems at headquarters without the requirement for implementing an expensive wide area network infrastructure.

—Lee Wines, Executive Vice President, Bank of Walnut Creek

Employees in remote offices often feel like the company's "step children." They frequently do not get access to the same level of support and services as headquarters users, let alone access to essential databases or business applications such as ERP or CRM suites.

An on-demand enterprise gives remote office users the same capabilities that they have when sitting at headquarters. SBC makes remote office employees more effective because they can see "their" applications no matter which PC or Windows terminal they use and no matter where they use it. They have access to their applications and corporate information whether at home or at an Internet caf on the other side of the world.

Users at remote offices are more productive because SBC enables them to access not only the corporate databases, but also the same network services—such as e-mail, color printing, and network faxing—as headquarters users.

Security In a PC-based computing environment, corporate information is susceptible to loss or theft because it is stored on hard drives of individual PCs and servers distributed throughout the enterprise. In an SBC environment, all corporate information is housed in corporate data centers where it is secure, managed, backed up, and redundant. An enterprise SBC environment limits network entry points to the central data center(s). This eliminates the vulnerability that many organizations incur when they allow access to the corporate network through servers located in remote offices. Terminal Services 2003 includes built-in support for smart cards, enabling organizations to implement even greater security measures. Security is addressed more thoroughly in Chapter 8.

Tip

Here is an important question to ask when comparing SBC with PC-based computing: do you want your corporate data sitting on hard drives of individual PCs and servers distributed throughout your enterprise, or do you want it all to reside at your corporate data center where it is protected, backed up, redundant, and managed in a secure environment?

Messaging SBC enables consolidation of e-mail servers in the data center, thereby eliminating the requirement for remote servers and replication. Data consolidation also makes it much easier to manage and access the data store.

Network Faxing SBC vastly reduces the cost of implementing a network fax solution by enabling fax servers to be consolidated in the data center rather than be distributed at remote offices. Most fax server products such as industry leader Captaris RightFax are designed to run with Terminal Services and with Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server. Employees can send faxes from their PCs and receive faxes directly into their e-mail program whether at headquarters, a remote office, or at home working through the Internet.

Facilitating Growth SBC enables faster and smoother organizational growth by making it easy and efficient to open remote offices and assimilate offices of acquired companies into an organization's IT environment. Servers do not need to be configured and set up in the remote offices. Users only need low-bandwidth connectivity to the data center, and IT can then publish application icons to their desktops. ABM Industries, for example, acquired another company in early 2003. The IT staff had all users in five different offices online with ABM's systems in under a week.

Eliminating Theft of Fat-Client PCs As organizations increasingly utilize Windows terminals instead of desktops and laptops, they remove the attraction for thieves to steal the devices since they are both inexpensive and useless without being attached to an SBC network.

Workforce Mobility

Citrix access infrastructure solutions extend access to a company's networked resources beyond the traditional office environment, allowing them to be accessed anywhere, over any connection, and on any device including wireless devices such as PDAs, smart phones, and tablet PCs. The low bandwidth requirements of Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server often make wireless connectivity a practical part of an SBC environment without rewriting applications or implementing expensive infrastructure upgrades. In addition, Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services and MetaFrame XP Presentation Server fully support handwriting recognition. This should open up myriad opportunities for using wireless tablets while connected to the data center in several industries, including legal and medical.

Telecommuting SBC users see only screen prints of applications, and the screen prints use very little bandwidth. Employees can effectively telecommute by dialing into the network or by coming in securely through the Internet utilizing the MetaFrame XP Presentation Server secure gateway component. A cable modem or DSL connection will often enable speeds equivalent to those obtained when using a fat-client PC at headquarters. Wireless WAN providers like Sprint, Verizon, Nextel, AT&T, and others provide, through the secure gateway, a secure, anytime, anywhere solution for traveling and remote users.

IT Flexibility

SBC gives IT departments flexibility in terms of adopting an application strategy without concern for developing a corresponding desktop deployment strategy. For instance, IT departments can purchase PCs or laptops without worrying about whether or not they will have the power and capacity to adequately operate a new set of unknown future applications. Even a seemingly simple task such as upgrading a company-wide browser version changes from a very time-consuming and expensive endeavor to a non-issue.

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery

Only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive...43 percent never reopen, and the remaining 51 percent reopen only to close within two years.

Disaster Recovery Journal, Fall, 2001

A PC-based computing environment has limited redundancy. A catastrophe at headquarters can leave hundreds or thousands of employees unable to do their work. Failure of a server in a remote office can mean a day or more of downtime until a replacement unit can be secured and installed. SBC makes it affordable to build redundancy into the corporate data center. Furthermore, Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server includes server farm fail-over utilization of redundant data centers. If the primary data center fails, users can automatically be redirected to a secondary data center and continue working. If a disaster at headquarters or a remote office leads to displaced workers, they can securely access their applications and data remotely over the Internet from alternative locations—including their homes. This enables better continuity protection for all headquarters and remote office users than is practical in a PC-based computing environment. Disaster recovery and business continuance are covered in Chapter 19.

Environmental and Regulatory Compliance Benefits of SBC

In addition to the compelling economic and business justifications for SBC, there are also positive environmental and regulatory compliance benefits.

Supporting the Environment

Rapidly declining prices of new, more powerful PC models accelerate the rate of PC obsolescence. Over one hundred thousand tons of old PCs are junked each year, but dumping them in a landfill can cause lead, mercury, and cadmium to leach into the soil. Incinerating them can release heavy metals and dioxin into the atmosphere. SBC extends the life of PCs by often enabling continued usage until they physically break, and then replacing them with long-lasting Windows terminals.

Complying with Government Regulation

New regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and California Senate Bill 1386 have important implications on how organizations conduct business. The information security aspects of these acts demand that organizations rethink their IT infrastructures, particularly whether they can afford the liability that is an inherent part of a distributed PC architecture. With an on-demand enterprise, all communication, documents, and workflows can both originate, and be stored on, central servers. Doing so ensures that corporate management always has copies of every stored document and is able to utilize software and hardware products to better protect and address the central information.

Industry Trends Accelerating Adoption of the On-Demand Enterprise

Three major industry trends are accelerating the adoption of SBC—and access infrastructure—as the foundation of the on-demand enterprise: Moore's Law, IT complexity, and IT consolidation.

Moore's Law

Moore's Law leads to a doubling of server performance roughly every 18 months without corresponding increases in cost. As more powerful Terminal Services/MetaFrame XP Presentation Servers support ever more users, the economics become even more favorable to-ward centralizing most organizational computing.

IT Complexity

The complexity of information systems is driving the cost of enterprise computing out of control, often offsetting the business benefits derived from information technology. Consequently, in spite of continuing and rapid advances in IT, it's more difficult than ever for IT organizations to provide consistent services to all the places and people necessary.

Each successive wave of computing—mainframe, minicomputer, PC, client-server, the Web, web services—has not superseded previous waves, but been piled on top of what came before. Moreover, the diversity and proliferation of access devices, computing platforms, software languages, networks, standards, and application infrastructures have further complicated the picture, making the cost of computing more variable and expensive than ever.

One of the most compelling attributes of the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite is its ability to manage heterogeneity, enabling IT teams to centrally deploy, manage, and support secure access to Windows, web, and UNIX applications across the Internet, intranets, wide area networks, local area networks, and wireless networks. By centralizing access to applications and information, IT staffs can deliver, manage, monitor, and measure enterprise resources on demand. Citrix customers are able to run IT as a corporate computing utility, provisioning software as a service.

IT Consolidation

Organizations are coping with the technical, economic, and business challenges of increasingly complex information systems through consolidation. They are reducing the number of moving parts by centralizing and consolidating as much of the heterogeneity and complexity as possible to fewer data centers, servers, and networks. At the same time, they are trying to align IT with the business imperative of getting closer to customers by streamlining supply chains, simplifying business processes, and enabling expanded business models.

Their goal is simplicity. They are trying to migrate to a model that allows them to improve the level of service they provide to the business. To accomplish this, many are moving the complexity of computing to a central place where it can best be managed, controlled, and changed over time. This makes everything outside the data center simpler to manage and more cost-effective to operate. It also dramatically improves information security and resilience to technological and business interruptions.

McKinsey believes that companies can untangle most of their unwanted IT complexity by focusing on five specific activities, which together will help them transform the way they use and manage IT, thus making IT organizations leaner and companies better prepared for the end of the downturn. These activities are to:

  • Target the root causes of complexity.

  • Instill a management culture in IT.

  • Invest in consolidation.

  • Reform the company's IT architecture.

  • Plan for outsourcing.

— "Fighting Complexity in IT," The McKinsey Quarterly, March 4, 2003

The on-demand enterprise is the embodiment of this vision. An access infrastructure based on the SBC model provides simpler ways to give users a consistent experience and access to IT services—from anywhere, while lowering and stabilizing the cost of computing. Consolidating servers, storage, networks and IT staff is made possible by the capability of managing heterogeneity centrally. Users are shielded from the complexity of accessing heterogeneous systems, while still having a trusted connection that knows their identity and a user interface that dynamically adjusts to their specific devices, locations, and preferences. The quality of IT service levels is improved through end-to-end visibility of who, where, how, and when systems are used. It also enables enterprise organizations to deliver software as a utility-like service. We discuss how an IT department can create a utility-like internal subscription billing model in Appendix C.

Concerns and Myths About SBC

When considering implementing enterprise SBC, it is important to address concerns about network infrastructure reliability and single points of failure. We have also discussed SBC as if the only option were to utilize both Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server software. We need to address concerns about using Microsoft Windows Terminal Services alone.

Network Unreliability

Enterprise SBC may be a new concept for your organization, but it is dependent upon your existing network infrastructure. It is senseless to take on an enterprise SBC project unless your organization is willing to make the necessary investment to bring your network infrastructure up to an extremely reliable and stable condition.

A history of network unreliability may have created user perceptions that they require their own departmental servers or must keep applications on their local hard drives to enable continued productivity in the event of network failure. In reality, users are becoming so dependent upon network applications, such as e-mail and browsing, that network failure means a loss of productivity in any case. Beyond this misperception, it is more prudent to spend a smaller amount of corporate resources building a redundant and reliable network than it is to devote a large amount of resources to maintaining an extremely inefficient PC-based contingency plan. SBC saves so much money on the client side that organizations should have the financial resources required to build world-class data centers and network infrastructures. Alternatively, they can utilize infrastructures already in place at established telecommunications or hosting companies. This option also generally makes it easier to utilize an existing data backbone to provide a secondary backup data center.

Single Point of Failure

Consolidating an organization's former PC-based computing environment into a central data center leaves remote offices, in particular, exposed to potential downtime risks they did not formerly face. A well-designed architecture utilizing the disaster recovery/business continuance capabilities of Citrix access infrastructure, as described earlier in this chapter, however, should significantly reduce cumulative organizational downtime.

Everything Is Becoming Web Based

Software manufacturers are increasingly writing Web-based interfaces to their applications. The reality, though, is that it is difficult to create a rich user interface in a web application. Even Microsoft's Outlook Web Access, for example, lacks the much richer interface of Microsoft Outlook. Most users prefer the dynamic and robust Windows interface to the static web-server HTML interface. Additionally, a browser requires a deceptively fat client in order to accommodate complex Java scripts and browser plug-ins. The browser, in fact, becomes an application that must itself be managed along with various plug-ins. This is complicated further by the use of embedded objects and client-side scripting as well as by applications that call other "helper applications" such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. They may require specific versions of these helper applications in order to operate properly.

If the client-side browser is used to access business-critical information and applications, then security of the browser also becomes a concern. IT needs to develop methodologies for installing the numerous IE security updates and for locking down the browser and ActiveX controls.

When pressed as to why certain organizations would prefer Web-based applications, the reasoning is typically to lower total cost of ownership, to centralize application deployment, to simplify and enable cross-platform application access, to enable faster application deployment, and to lower maintenance at the desktop. But Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server provide all of those benefits today with legacy Windows applications, thereby avoiding the often underestimated expense and time involved in rewriting them for the Web.

Even when web applications are utilized, it still typically makes sense to deploy them from an administrative perspective, via MetaFrame XP Presentation Server where the browser is hosted on the server farms. Since a web application generally utilizes some combination of HTML/XML, client-side scripting, server-side scripting, and embedded controls to send data to the client device, deploying it via MetaFrame XP Presentation Server can help alleviate bandwidth concerns. A study by Citrix of a PeopleSoft 8 implementation showed that the average bandwidth consumption to the client desktop was reduced 57 percent by running the browser within a MetaFrame session rather than directly on the client workstation.

By deploying our Web-based physical therapy documentation application via Citrix MetaFrame, we were able to improve the performance of the application by reducing page refresh times from four seconds to less than one second. Prior to the use of MetaFrame, we were only able to roll out application updates two to three times per year. With MetaFrame, we are able to update applications nightly, if necessary.

—Wayne Dodrill, Manager of Systems Integration, Concentra Health Services

Citrix is committed to deploying all applications effectively through SBC. It makes more sense to implement SBC technology that will work for both Windows and web-based applications than it does to continue investing in a bloated PC-based architecture that is inefficient today and will be even more so in the future.

Microsoft Will Make Citrix Obsolete

As a key Microsoft partner and a trusted name in enterprise access, Citrix continues to deliver impressive product functionality that adds value to the Microsoft Windows Server Terminal Services environment, leverages the Microsoft .NET framework and allows customers to easily take advantage of their enterprise resources.

—Graham Clark, GM, .NET Platform Strategy & Partner Group, Microsoft

Microsoft is very supportive of Citrix and is a Premier Plus member of the Citrix Business Alliance. Indeed, Microsoft recognizes that Citrix drives a substantial amount of Microsoft software sales by freeing up organizational economic and staffing resources. This enables IT staffs to focus on the evaluation, selection and quality of implementation of applications rather than worrying about the delivery mechanics.

As with other Microsoft independent software vendors (ISVs), however, the challenge for Citrix is to continue adding value to Terminal Services. Thus far, the company has unquestionably succeeded. Microsoft views Terminal Services as an application delivery tool while the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite is access infrastructure for the on-demand enterprise, enabling both managed heterogeneity and universal access. It is difficult, consequently, to imagine tackling an enterprise SBC initiative without the advantages the MetaFrame Access Suite provides in areas such as management, administration, presentation, disaster recovery, security, performance, user acceptance, conferencing, single sign-on, and IT consolidation simplification. The value that the MetaFrame Access Suite adds to Terminal Services is discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 3.

If, in the future, Microsoft or some other vendor makes MetaFrame Access Suite unnecessary, then only the software investment is lost. Although the cost of the MetaFrame software is not insignificant, it pales in comparison to the savings that companies are realizing by implementing SBC to create an on-demand enterprise. Such a solution is a serious and complex undertaking utilizing relatively new technology on constantly changing platforms. It is imperative that sacrifices not be made in the quality of the data center and networking infrastructure. This is also true for the MetaFrame Access Suite component. Delaying the decision to implement SBC in order to see what the future may bring means the continuation of large and unnecessary expenditures in the present.




Citrix Metaframe Access Suite for Windows Server 2003(c) The Official Guide
Citrix Access Suite 4 for Windows Server 2003: The Official Guide, Third Edition
ISBN: 0072262893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 158

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net