Located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Enta USA is a ticketing services company that provides a suite of ticketing applications to arenas, theaters, concert halls, museums, and colleges and universities. The Enta ticketing solution is used by such organizations as the Ravinia Festival, the Nampa Civic Center and the University of New Mexico. The company expanded from the UK to the U.S. in 2007.

The challenge: building a robust, reliable managed service model

Enta’s ticketing solution, which is built on Microsoft® Project and incorporates Microsoft® Office functionality, comprises a dozen applications with rich functionality. They include Make a Booking for box office ticket sales; a marketing application called Enta Marketing; Documentation Manager for generating customized documents; and Sales Ledger to allow agents to handle ticketing on behalf of the organization. Enta also provides Web applications (Enta Connect) to support online ticket sales.

“A lot of our clients don’t have the staff or expertise to deliver this robust application suite across a large organization,” said Trey Hoffman, director, IT. “So we are focusing primarily on a managed service model—meaning that Enta hosts the applications on our own IT infrastructure and delivers them to the customer.”

He continued, “Even when we were licensing the solution to customers for internal use, we recommended that they deliver it using Citrix Presentation Server™ instead of deploying it to the desktop. And once we realized most customers wanted the managed service model, it was a natural transition for us to build that service on Presentation Server.”

Enta’s original managed service model called for dedicating a physical server or
two—running Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003—to  each customer. “That approach was all right, but not where we wanted to be in terms of reliability and agility,” Hoffman explained. “This is a mission-critical application for the client. We have to deliver a service they can absolutely depend on. When you have a long line of people waiting at the box office, the person using our point-of-sale application is under great pressure to get those tickets processed quickly and accurately.”

He continued, “We wanted to build in redundancy, but the cost of purchasing extra hardware for each client was cost-prohibitive. So we turned to virtualization technology to achieve redundancy without all that dedicated hardware.”

Expanding the Application Delivery Infrastructure from Citrix

Although Enta’s IT team looked at other server virtualization solutions, they chose Citrix® XenServer™, Platinum Edition, part of the Citrix Delivery Center™ system, to achieve optimal integration with Presentation Server. Hoffman said, “We know we are going to have a close relationship with Citrix for a long time, and we feel confident Presentation Server is going to perform much better on XenServer than on other virtualization platforms.” Enta expects to use XenServer to virtualize its Web servers, which support online ticketing, as well.

In addition to running Citrix Presentation Server virtually with XenServer, Enta is using Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters to quickly bring new clients online by streaming server workloads to the virtual servers.

Enta upgraded to Presentation Server, Platinum Edition and implemented a Citrix Access Gateway™ appliance to leverage the SSL VPN functionality included in the Platinum Edition. Access Gateway provides secure application delivery to Enta customers.

“We’ve also implemented two Citrix® NetScaler®, Enterprise Edition appliances to handle load balancing and SSL offloading for our Web servers, as well as to front-end our Presentation Server environment. NetScaler appliances are top in the industry and a great product.” Enta leverages the Application Firewall component of Citrix NetScaler to protect both these systems against application-layer threats.

Delivering a managed service quickly and cost-effectively

Although Enta just recently opened its U.S. division, the company expects to grow rapidly. The Citrix solution will allow the company to expand quickly and cost-effectively. “We are looking to add between 20 and 30 clients a year,” said George Newton IV, vice president, business. “Citrix technology such as Provisioning Server, which has automated our process of bringing new clients online, is enabling us to deploy our managed service model very rapidly.”

The solution also provides significant cost advantages. “With Citrix virtualization technologies, instead of buying a piece of server hardware that costs $6,000 and only supports 25 or 30 users, we can spend a bit more and get maybe 70 users on that box. And we no longer have to dedicate physical servers to just one client.

“We stand to save 50 to 60 percent in total hardware and software costs. Say, for example, we can avoid growing our datacenter to 200 dedicated servers over three years. Instead, we use 75 boxes running XenServer virtual machines. That’s a savings of 125 servers, worth about $750,000. Our old cost model was linear—add hardware as we add clients. With virtualization, that cost curve flattens out,” he noted.

In addition, Enta can support the Citrix environment with a fraction of the IT staff needed for a traditional datacenter. Finally, server virtualization helps reduce overhead and power consumption, making it a greener solution.

Strengthening PCI DSS compliance

Like other organizations that are involved with processing credit card transactions, Enta and its customers must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is being mandated by the major credit card companies. “PCI DSS compliance is very important to us and our clients, especially the university market, which is being scrutinized for adherence,” Newton commented. “We will be undertaking this process in the near future. We intend to evaluate the Application Firewall functionality of NetScaler as a solution for PCI DSS compliance.” Installing an application firewall or undergoing audits are the two major alternatives for meeting the requirements of this standard.

Optimizing business continuity

Before implementing its Citrix solution, Enta had to replicate its servers at an offsite location for business continuity. Now, with XenServer and Presentation Server, instead of having to set up separate hardware, the company can set up a single XenServer farm. “Then, all we have to do is copy the server images and keep them linked up. If the site goes down, it’s just a matter of provisioning the servers at the failover site with Provisioning Server.”

Newton concluded, “We know that virtualization is the future of IT. We want to transform our entire environment with the Citrix Delivery Center™ application delivery infrastructure system.”

Future plans

Enta is looking into Citrix® WANScaler™ to optimize application delivery to geographically dispersed clients.

About the Citrix Solution

Citrix Presentation Server™, part of the Citrix XenApp™ product family, the new name for Presentation Server, is the de facto standard for delivering Windows® applications at the lowest cost—to any user, anywhere. Citrix® XenServer™, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is an enterprise-class solution for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. Citrix Provisioning Server™ enables IT organizations to dynamically stream datacenter and desktop operating systems and workloads to both virtual and physical machines from a central location. Citrix Access Gateway™ is the only SSL VPN to securely deliver any application with policy-based SmartAccess control. Citrix® NetScaler® optimizes the delivery of Web applications—increasing security and improving performance and Web server capacity. This approach ensures the best Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), security, availability and performance for Web applications.

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