House of Blues
Los Angeles, California
Challenge: Centrally support each restaurant in a nationwide chain with a variety of applications, including Platinum Technology's Financials, a food inventory system written in Access, Exchange, and office automation.
Evaluation: "After setting up our sixth full-blown network [each with 10 PCs to 35 PCs] at each restaurant location, we asked, 'Why don't we centralize the whole damn thing?'" explained Rick Smith, vice president of IS and technology for House of Blues (HOB), a nationwide chain of restaurants. "Our main interest in this technology is that it lets us focus on the business issues: build distributed systems or centralize them. Microsoft Terminal Server lets us centralize without losing the performance. The architecture—hardware, development, maintenance, support, software—it's all easier than a distributed system. For example, Platinum Financials uses SQL Server as its database. If I distributed the application, I would need to build a separate SQL Server box at every venue. With Terminal Server, I could centralize the entire application."
Solution: To host all applications and users from Los Angeles, HOB uses Terminal Server on multiple servers to host the client portions of Platinum Financials, Exchange, a food inventory system, and office automation. HOB has a 4 * 200 server for Platinum, a 4 * 200 server for SQL Server, and a 4 * 200 server for Exchange. The company currently supports 100 concurrent users on two dual-processor load-balanced Compaq Proliant systems. Rick Smith estimates 20 users per processor at 24MB per user, for a total load of 512MB of RAM on each server. HOB added Citrix MetaFrame to Terminal Server for ICA protocol support. "MetaFrame really shines on dial-up," he said.
Results: HOB went live on beta 1 of Terminal Server and has updated the client portion of its applications by making changes to its load-balanced servers. "A few hours later, the clients were updated. No field visits!" Smith said. "You hear a lot about the negative side of WAN performance, but if you set it up right, you can even beat the performance of a local PC client in some cases."
According to Smith, "Our food inventory system is written in Access. Think of deploying an Access system over a WAN. We can run it now with Terminal Server—it's now multiuser and multivenue. We pull the data out of the UNIX POSIX systems over 128Kbps. We just put an icon on the desktop, and it handles all communications over the WAN. It's much simpler and faster than RAS. You can take a terminal out of the box and have it running in 5 minutes. The bad side is that I could not plug it directly into my Cisco switch. We might try a new venue with terminals instead of PCs. But I'm not convinced that terminals can do everything we need.
"The shadow function from Terminal Server is very handy. It lets me help any users at any time at any venue. We have yet to read the manual. We paid a guy who knew Citrix WinFrame really well to help us set it up."
Recommendation: Smith said, "Go in with an open mind, because this solution will do more things than you think it will. Don't be cheap. Put more power than you need on the server. Performance will no longer be an issue. Also, don't fight the battle of trying to remove PCs from PC users. There's enough benefit without trying to go all terminals or thin clients. Have you ever seen someone successfully argue someone out of a love affair? Don't try to remove users' PCs unless the CFO or the owner is totally behind you and won't desert you. If you need multimedia, Lotus, or Excel, then buy a PC. Otherwise, buy a terminal. Find the balance."
Panal Pina
Morristown, New Jersey
Challenge: Replace thousands of dumb terminals in branch offices throughout the world. Support various applications, including project-forwarding, SAP R/3, Office97, and Telnet applications. Need to deploy new Windows-based G U I freight-forwarding applications within 1 year.
Evaluation: Panal Pina, a company providing worldwide freight-forwarding service, heard that Office 97 applications running on Citrix WinFrame perform poorly. What the company discovered, however, was that Office 97 can perform well on WinFrame. "Our accounting runs huge Excel spreadsheets with lots of calculations. It's three to four times faster than running it on a Pentium desktop," said Panal Pina's systems administrator, Lee Fernandez. "I was skeptical at first, but WinFrame has proved us wrong."
When he evaluated Citrix MetaFrame, Fernandez found the shadowing capability of ICA to be valuable. Because the RDP protocol does not support shadowing, Fernandez considers MetaFrame a must-buy, although he hates paying the extra license fee. "Adding the 5000 dollars per 15 users for MetaFrame is way too expensive. It's doubling my price over WinFrame," he said.
Solution: Panal Pina uses Wyse Winterm terminals and DOS clients served by Citrix WinFrame on Data General servers. In the US, Panal Pina has 16 4 * 200 servers with 1GB of RAM each. Panal Pina clusters these servers using Citrix's load-balancing feature. The North American operation consolidates all application serving into central hubs. Each server farm handles 10 sites, which are connected to the farms by a frame-relay network. The North American server farms support 700 users; each server can handle 10 to 30 users. Currently, Panal Pina can support 12 simultaneous users on a 64Kbps frame relay and 30 users on a 128Kbps frame relay. "Citrix ICA protocol is very efficient," Fernandez said.
Outside the US, Panal Pina locates its servers in each site because the telecommunications infrastructure across Europe and Asia can handle only limited bandwidth. In Europe and Asia, Panal Pina supports over 1000 users with Citrix WinFrame running on 49 Data General 2 * 200 servers.
Results: Talking about Panal Pina's North American TCSC environment, Fernandez said, "It makes our support department look good. It has maximized our support staff; we need fewer people to support this. Beyond shadowing, the second-best feature of WinFrame is rapid deployment of applications. We were able to upgrade SAP's client application overnight. [Without Winframe,] that job would have taken us over a month. We would have needed to send someone out to the sites to upgrade all the PCs."
Fernandez estimates that supporting thin clients requires one-quarter the number of staff that a similarly sized PC environment requires. "At one point in our implementation, we had 50 percent terminals and 50 percent PCs. I supported all the terminals, and it took four guys to support the PCs," Fernandez said.
Panal Pina has not purchased a desktop PC (excluding laptops) since March 1997. "Most users don't want to give up the freedom of the PC. But when you show them the performance difference, they willingly give it up, Fernandez added.
Recommendation: Lee Fernandez had a lot of advice for administrators interested in thin client/server implementations. Here's a summary of his recommendations.
When you set up user profiles, use mandatory profiles. That way, if you have one profile for hundreds of users, you can make one change to change the profiles of all your users. Fernandez explains, "My 400 users are broken into three profiles. I could probably use one profile for all the users and use scripts to make changes. Use a good scripting utility like KiXtart or Perl, not batch files built into NT."
Keep all data and applications on the server, "because even over a 100Mbps link, [data transmission] was slower. There is not a lot of good technical information."
Find a solution provider that really understands Citrix. "Data General took care of us in the beginning. You don't want to do this on your own. You need to partner with someone who has experience. You really need experience with NT to get it set up correctly. Data General is like IBM was back in the old days: Essentially, all hardware is the same stuff. You're really buying services."
Citrix's Web site is an excellent resource, "but you really need to keep on top of it. You need to keep up with the patches. It's not rocket science, but it takes a lot of time."
Watch out for the older Wyse Winterms. "A BIOS older than version 2.64 does not allow remote updating. This means you need to hook up a laptop with LapLink and update each Winterm manually." Fernandez also experienced a 10 percent failure rate on Wyse Winterms and hopes Wyse can improve the terminals' quality.
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