Company Background
As one of Britain’s leading theatre companies and a springboard for many internationally acclaimed actors, designers and directors, our client is on an exciting journey, as it returns back to its former home, following a long-term renovation.
The Challenge and Solution
The theatre company had a requirement to replace some of its ageing PCs. With the cost involved in replacing those PCs, the overheads associated with rolling the new ones out, in addition to their ongoing maintenance, Tek-nology Solutions offered an alternative solution.
Implementing desktop virtualisation through Citrix VDI-in-a-Box offered the company the opportunity to ‘sweat their assets’ by extending the lifetime of their existing PCs.
The Citrix VDI-in-a-Box solution also fulfilled supplementary objectives – responding to the growth of ‘Bring Your Own Device’, in line with the consumerisation of IT, and expanding the company’s limited remote working capabilities. Owing to the nature of this technology, it now offers the option for any one of their 75 employees to work remotely.
The Results
- Provision of a tailored desktop for users – according to which security group they are assigned to, offering a choice of desktop operating system and applications.
- Compatibility of legacy applications – VDI desktops support legacy applications as they can be tailored to individual needs, offering a choice of desktop operating system and applications.
Since other desktop virtualisation technologies, including Citrix XenApp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and other similar solutions, are based on a single network operating system, providing a one-size fits all approach, they do not offer a tailored desktop and may not support some legacy applications.
- Device Agnostic – The virtual desktop is consistent, regardless of device, time of day, and location.
- Reduced costs – of desktop management and application rollout.
- Ease and speed of desktop rollout – through more simple, centralised management of data and systems it has become much easier to roll‐out the latest operating systems and upgrades to all users. IT no longer needs to repeat numerous, manual tasks to ensure all desktops are up-to-date with the latest patches, updates, upgrades and refreshes to maintain desktop performance and security.
- Ease of desktop management – with centralised control, there is no longer the need to update every individual physical desktop – the solution only requires updates to be made to one or two central images, taking an hour or two as opposed to days.
- BYOD – virtual desktops can be presented to any device and therefore lends itself to the theatre company being able to introduce a fully-fledged BYOD policy.
- Improved desktop performance –today’s software can be run on older hardware, maximising the lifetime of PC and laptop assets. Processing is now taking place on the server, where the applications and business data now reside, rather than on the local machine.
- Consistent experience – since users now effectively log on to a ‘virtual’ desktop as opposed to accessing applications from their physical desktop, the experience is consistent, regardless of type of device or location. This has provided an improved home working experience.
- Improved data security – by centralising access to applications and data. If local equipment is damaged, lost or stolen, sensitive company data no longer disappears along with the endpoint device.
- Lower cost of ownership – the more complex and costly infrastructure associated with traditional VDI technology, i.e. the SAN infrastructure, is no longer required when implementing VDI-in-a-Box.
In Summary
In proposing Citrix VDI-in-a-Box as a solution to meet the theatre company’s needs, Tek-nology Solutions went on to undertake the scoping exercise, sizing the server hardware the VDI software runs on to implement Citrix VDI-in-a-Box.
This solution has enabled the theatre to eliminate many of the traditional problems associated with managing the inefficiencies and costs of operating and managing PCs, including the need for frequent software upgrades and PC refresh cycles.
The theatre company now has a solution that more readily lends itself to providing a consistent experience to both office and remote workers, regardless of device, which is also addressing the demands associated with BYOD.
