Virtualize and Save

Brantford Public Library enjoys high costs savings and customer satisfaction with their new Citrix and VMWare Systems.

 “We have already seen a savings in hardware replacement budget. We purchased Thin Clients to replace old computers, and also are using old computers for virtual streaming. Even considering setup costs (new servers and Virtualization/Citrix software, licenses, etc.) we will net a significant hardware replacement savings annually.” – Nancy Wolf, Brantford Public Library

Brantford Public Library provides clients with access to a multitude of Public resources between 2 branches, 60 workstations, and 70 Staff

The challenge: Reduce yearly I.T Costs while providing patrons with improved responsiveness and more consistent experience.

For the last couple of years The Brantford Public Library has been working with Binatech and looking for a way to provide a more dynamic method of deploying applications to their Public workstations, while at the same time trying to reduce the support requirements for these workstations.

 “We were maintaining a large amount of Ghost images for these workstations, after any major change we would need to update all of these images as well as the workstations themselves. Each new batch of PC’s usually required a new image” says Nancy Wolf. “We wanted to get away from having to maintain a workstation, using virtualization technology allows us provide the same experience to a terminal that is half the cost and zero maintenance”

As the amount of public services being offered grew, the Library also wanted the capability to be able to dynamically update or install new applications. Using Citrix Xen Desktop they are able to now stream a single image to their workstations allowing applications to be installed or removed in minutes instead of hours.

Adding a new virtualization solution

One of the main requirements of the project was that patrons would see no degradation in performance or usability when moving to a thin client.

 Citrix Flex-cast and HDX technology was a perfect fit. Due to the array of services offered, the Library made use of the Flex-cast technology to provide terminals with single applications, full desktops, or in some cases full streamed workstations. This allowed them make use of existing PC’s while still maintaining all of the benefits of the virtualized solution. Citrix HDX was also a key factor as it allowed patrons to view the same media rich content over a virtualized solution.

Citrix Xen Desktop allows the library to quickly build a consistent desktop and then stream it out to a number of workstations; this greatly reduces support time, deployment time and provides a consistent desktop to our patrons. No matter what system they use they will always have a consistent build of desktop. Deploying workstations has gone from hours to minutes and since these workstations are streamed in the event of any issue the workstations is rebooted to put it back in its original state all changes made throughout the day are removed.

 Binatech used VMware VSphere servers to reduce hardware costs and to host the virtual infrastructure. With the consolidation ratio available on VMware the library is able to run their complete infrastructure off 2 hosts and maintain an offline copy for disaster recovery.

Increasing IT efficiency and cost savings

This centralized solution will increase IT efficiency and cost effectiveness, the capability to maintain one disk that effects a large number of workstations allows support staff to patch, upgrade and deploy workstations in a fraction of the time. By using terminals, workstation replacement is now a fraction of the cost.

 Using VMWare Sphere allows for high server consolidation ratio. “In the next year we will be looking into consolidating a number of our systems onto VMware” says Nancy “This will reduce our hardware maintenance, cooling and power consumption costs as we can now put 6-10 servers on a single piece of server hardware, compared to our current 1 to 1”