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UCI Logistics, who provide supply chain solutions for many leading Blue Chip organisations, will save £100,000 in maintenance and capital costs in the next 3 years with a solution implemented by Centralis using Novell Net services software to manage a Citrix MetaFrame server farm.
Overview:
When you provide warehousing and distribution services for some of the UK's household names it's essential that you maximise the use of technology to manage and enhance your business processes. UCI Logistics operates from 15 locations in the UK, with over 750 employees, 1 million square feet of warehousing and more than 450 trucks and trailers.
Working with a small team of IT staff, Kevin Higgs, IT Director, is always looking for ways to advance the delivery of technology and information systems to his users and improve the performance of his department. "About five years ago we adopted a strategy to standardise on our technology components", says Higgs. "That means the infrastructure, our network operating system, our LAN servers as well as the business applications. The reason was to simplify the support processes and increase availability to our users."
As part of his overall strategy of simplification Higgs and his team chose Novell products for the network operating system, network management, email and collaborative working tools and Microsoft Office for standard business tools.
The Challenge:
As a logistics company, UCI Logistics has remote sites scattered around the UK. "At the time we operated from 15 sites and managed up to six local area networks. An added consideration was that we also had people based at key customer locations as well as in our own premises", explains Higgs. "And it's important that they all have access to our central systems as well as local business applications."
All of the UCI Logistics sites are connected by a WAN infrastructure. The head office at Sutton in Ashfield holds most of the central IT systems, with three IBM AS/400 servers delivering the key business applications. "In addition we have NetWare and GroupWise servers plus a dedicated fileserver for our fleet management system", says Higgs.
However, even with its existing configuration and infrastructure it was still proving impossible to give staff at remote sites access to essential central applications such as the finance system. "The client server applications required a thick client, which meant the network was just too slow and there wasn't sufficient bandwidth to support a useable remote implementation of the applications."
"The vision was always to provide users with the ability to use any machine, regardless of who they were or where the machine was located in the network," explains Higgs. Using their Novell login, users have their personal desktop delivered to that machine and Novell Application Launcher enables their applications to run. "NDS eDirectory provides the backbone for our business", says Higgs. "It allows us to give a lot of power and performance to users without increasing our management burden."
"We wanted to improve our capability as a small team to manage the whole of the network and reduce our overall capital and maintenance costs", says Higgs. "We decided that a Citrix MetaFrame solution would be ideal for our needs, but we wanted it to work within our existing Novell environment, as NDS was doing such a good job for us and we had become great fans of it."
UCI Logistics appointed Centralis, a Novell Business Expert and Citrix Consulting Solutions Provider, for the MetaFrame design, integration with NDS eDirectory and implementation project.
Novell / Centralis Solution
As an accredited Citrix Consulting Solutions Provider and a registered Novell Business Expert in Consulting, Centralis was in the ideal position to assist UCI Logistics. "There are a number of benefits with the integration of Citrix and Novell environments," says Mike Williams, operations director at Centralis, "including directory managed application delivery in the MetaFrame environment. Centralis have been working with Novell and Citrix to optimise the integration, and have developed the required tools and skill set to deliver the benefits."
Centralis developed Centralis AXE, a utility designed to simplify and accelerate the use of ZENworks for Desktops to manage Windows PC and Terminal Server/Citrix MetaFrame environments. In MetaFrame installations, applications need to have entries and settings modified before they can be deployed. "Centralis AXE does this and more, which saves UCI Logistics hours of work creating new application objects," said Simon Salloway, PC Support Manager at UCI Logistics.
The final solution comprises a central four-server Citrix server farm based in UCI Logistics' Sutton in Ashfield offices and a rollout programme to replace PC-based clients with lower-cost, lower maintenance Wyse terminals. "It's such an elegant solution", says Higgs. "We get faster performance for our users, centralised data storage, the ability to log in from any device plus a common interface.
Delivering applications using Citrix's MetaFrame is economical on bandwidth, allowing even the demanding AS/400 applications to work effectively at remote sites."
The Result:
The long term benefits for UCI Logistics have been quickly seen in terms of reduced maintenance, increased delivery and the reliability of the desktops has been improved further through standardisation. "Centralis has brought together the Novell and Citrix technologies to create a first-class solution. When we moved our users from Office 95 to Office 97 we had to visit every PC", says Higgs. "Now we are moving to Office 2000 by deploying a ZENworks snAppShot to the Citrix MetaFrame server farm - that's a big difference. We really have improved our capacity to manage the network and improve the service we deliver to our users."
Higgs estimates that over a three-year period, the saving in maintenance and capital costs will be almost £100,000, despite the added investment in the Citrix infrastructure and servers. "Terminals have a longer life span than PCs, and lower maintenance costs. Even with the additional budget needed for buying Citrix MetaFrame licences, improving the resilience of our backbone and of course adding the Citrix servers, we expect to save £30,000 in capital costs alone this year."
Mike Williams sums up the project saying, "Once you simplify the client to a commodity item, standardise the services and how they are delivered, then manage all changes from a single point, you have a truly flexible and highly cost-effective architecture. UCI Logistics understood the vision of how this combination of directory management and thin client delivery could free them from traditional restraints, and allow I.S. to truly support their business."
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