Reference story - Equalit Shared Service Center IT
The Dutch municipalities of Oosterhout, Hilvarenbeek, Baarle-Nassau and Oisterwijk provide services to over 100,000 citizens. These local authorities run numerous subsidiaries, including fi re stations, town shipyards, sports centers, a sheltered workshop and a theater. Equalit, the Shared Service Center (SCC) of the municipality of Oosterhout, is responsible for supporting the combined IT infrastructure of these four local authorities, totaling more than 1,000 desktops.
The Challenge
A few years ago, a number of local authorities decided to cooperate in order to support increasingly complex IT moving forward. This cooperation, called the Midden-Brabant IT (MIBRI), sparked a synergy between the municipalities, which made it much easier to create an integrated ICT environment.
“The municipality of Oosterhout was eager to participate in the MIBRI cooperation. Eventually, the IT department at the municipality of Oosterhout initiated Equalit, the current Shared Service Center for Oosterhout, Hilvarenbeek, Baarle-Nassau and Oisterwijk,” said Sietse Beukenkamp, Senior System Administrator at Equalit. “In 2006, we decided to design a new architecture that was fl exible, allowing new services to be introduced, and at the same time was very easy for system administrators to use.”
“This architecture solved the often confl icting demands for flexibility and ease of administration on a small scale. However, we wanted to upscale the concept and reuse it within the Shared Service Center, offering it to all subsidiaries of the participating local authorities. From the very beginning in 2002, when we were still a small department at the municipality of Oosterhout, RES PowerFuse was a great help, and so RES PowerFuse had to be part of the new architecture. We were also looking for a solution to improve the manageability of servers and desktops in general, and software packages on terminal servers in particular.“
The Solution
About two years ago, Equalit and System Integrator Cam IT Solutions started designing a completely new and improved architecture. Because fl exibility and ease of administration were a top priority, the search lead to a combination of innovative solutions which included RES PowerFuse, RES Wisdom, Citrix XenApp (Citrix Presentation Server) and Microsoft App-V (SoftGrid). The new centralized environment was implemented by Cam IT Solutions.
Today, over 50 HP DL360 servers with Windows Server 2003 run Citrix XenApp for desktop virtualization, RES PowerFuse for user workspace management and RES Wisdom for the management of servers and CAD desktops. For a fixed price per desktop, a virtualized desktop including all desktop services is delivered to the four local authorities. This makes the Equalit solution a real Desktop as a Service (DaaS) environment. Almost 90 percent of all desktops are Athena thin clients. The remaining desktops are laptops and CAD workstations.
The Benefits
The RES Software products offer a high level of flexibility and cost very little system administration effort. All configuration settings are maintained centrally from a management console that is intuitive and easy to use. “Shadowing sessions, assigning printers, authorizing applications according to our information policy or generating reports: everything is presented cleary and well organized,” continued Beukenkamp. “We have even done away with writing and maintaining scripts and with complex Windows policies. For reasons of security and privacy, access to certain applications (such as the database of citizens’ personal data) is not allowed when working from home. The RES PowerFuse feature PowerZones™ makes it very easy to determine and filter access to certain applications based on the end user’s location. We do not need any scripts or complex firewall configurations.“
RES PowerFuse makes it possible to run multiple Oracle clients simultaneously. Using an environment variable in the RES PowerFuse management console, makes it mpossible for employees to use both the v8 en v9 clients concurrently on the same Citrix XenApp server. This feature is very important, because the DigiD legislation often
makes it necessary to deliver new applications within a very short time period. For other applications, such as Cognos Impromptu, RES PowerFuse delivers one instance of the
application to multiple local authorities, each with different configuration settings. Beukenkamp: “We had a lot of Windows installer files, and Installation Manager – a component of Citrix XenApp – was very inconvenient to use. In addition, DLL problems
with applications meant that we were not able to create packages for all of them. During the renewal phase in 2006, we decided to implement RES Wisdom in tandem with Microsoft App-V. These products complemented eachother perfectly.“ The organization creates packages and virtualizes them with Microsoft App-V. RES Wisdom handles the rest of the system administration on servers: everything from the maintenance of Citrix settings to defragmenting hard disks and cleaning profiles. Jobs are started immediately or are scheduled for off-peak hours with the built-in scheduler.
Besides thin clients, the municipalities also have CAD workstations for applications that need to be run locally. For example, Bentley MicroStation is used for maintenance information about roads, pavements and open space planning using maps and layouts. These CAD workstations are deployed completely with RES Wisdom. The RES
PowerFuse Workspace Extender™, a component of RES PowerFuse, nicely integrates these local applications with the centralized applications running on Citrix XenApp. RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom are very easy to learn, as was proved recently. “When employees from the local authorities of Hilvarenbeek and Baarle-Nassau joined the IT staff in Oosterhout, they could start working in the new infrastructure almost immediately. There was no need for a course, and after a couple of days learning on the job, everybody got the hang of it,” concluded Beukenkamp. “Without RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom, we would certainly have needed more system administrators to maintain the environment with the same level of quality.”
Main benefits
• Universal management console delivers an easy learning curve
• Increases efficiency for system administrators
• Integrates seamlessly with Microsoft App-V (Softgrid)
• Enables working from home by filtering privacy-sensitive applications
• Simplifies delivery of applications and application management
We've even done away with writing and maintaining scripts and with complex Windows policies. For reasons of security and privacy, access to certain applications is not allowed when working from home.
Sietske Beukenkamp, Senior System Administrator , Netherlands