ZRWest was formed through the merger of the IT departments of the German Pension Fund Westphalia and the German Pension Fund Rhineland. Today, the internal service provider is tasked with providing both pension fund carriers with all required systems and applications. In doing so, ZRWest has optimized many processes with regard to cost-effectiveness and user experience over the past few years.

The challenge: a centralized infrastructure for application delivery

An important prerequisite for process optimization was the development of a centralized infrastructure for the delivery of applications. In 2001, the IT department of the German Pension Fund Rhineland, the former LVA Rheinprovinz, decided to centrally deliver the newly introduced Windows®-based pension fund system, GRVS, via Citrix XenApp™. As a result, on the one hand, the replacement of several thousand end-user devices to support the new application was avoided because application virtualization enables delivery to any device. On the other hand, XenApp centralized management significantly reduced the effort and expense of administering nearly 4,000 IT workstations at 13 locations.

“Through the implementation of Citrix technology, desktop maintenance was completely transferred from the client to the central server farm,” said Achim Manz-Bothe, head of system technology at ZRWest in Düsseldorf. “With XenApp, we needed only 20 minutes to make updates or new applications available across the entire service area.” Additional Windows-based applications such as Microsoft® Office and Lotus Notes were thus subsequently delivered via XenApp as well. The centralization of IT resources allowed for significant cost savings: an economic feasibility analysis proved that operating costs were reduced by around 1.3 million euros in the first three years.

Expanding an Application Delivery Infrastructure solution from Citrix

In order to further optimize application delivery and management and support new access scenarios, a number of additional technologies were tested and implemented. For example, ZRWest installed Citrix® NetScaler® for load balancing of critical Java applications. This application networking solution from Citrix equally distributes user load to the available back-end servers. Also, the organization upgraded to XenApp, Platinum Edition to gain functionality powered by Citrix® EdgeSight® and Citrix Access Gateway™. The Access Gateway SSL VPN plays an important role: users are granted secure access to their applications and data when connecting from outside the office. Users of protected Web access include executives and employees out on parental leave.

Further, remote software maintenance work by external developers should soon be handled via the Access Gateway environment. ZRWest has developed a secure auditing process that combines several protective measures. External users initially sign on to a dedicated XenApp farm via the Citrix Web Interface functionality. Access is secured via a two-level authentication process with an RSA SecurID token. After successfully signing in, the user is assigned policy-based individual rights using Citrix SmartAccess technology. Access Gateway also encodes the entire communication between the end device and the server farm during the XenApp session.

In addition, SmartAuditor technology, which is a component of the Platinum Edition of Citrix XenApp, is used to record the complete user session if this is required by an organization’s regulatory compliance guidelines. “With SmartAuditor, we achieve absolute auditing security in our collaboration with external partners,” said Manz-Bothe. “Regardless of which systems are undergoing external remote maintenance, an audit is only required at one location – the datacenter. This not only simplifies compliance with our security guidelines, but also helps us to reduce costs.”

End-to-end analysis of application performance

In addition to cost control and security, the topic of service quality is of central importance for ZRWest. The IT service provider uses IBM Tivoli software for comprehensive system monitoring of the complex IT infrastructure. “The solution gives us a very good horizontal overview and provides us with some fundamental information about the performance and availability of our systems. However, what we had been missing was an in-depth examination that would allow for more specific and more exact statements to be made about trends and processes within the world of applications,” explained Karl-Heinz Stein, head of systems technology at ZRWest in Münster. Precisely for this challenge, ZRWest is now implementing the performance monitoring solutions Citrix EdgeSight for XenApp and EdgeSight® for Endpoints. These technologies provide a seamless overview of how centrally delivered and locally installed applications behave from the perspective of the end user. Based on historical and current data, administrators can see the level of performance of applications hosted on XenApp or running on the local device. They are thus able to identify and resolve possible bottlenecks.

Via the Web-based EdgeSight console, administrators can configure real-time alerts for specific events or critical performance values. As soon as the system sends out an alarm, it is passed to the ZRWest Tivoli Event Console via an SNMP trap. “We are thus able to seamlessly integrate the real-time system monitoring by EdgeSight into our Tivoli system,” Stein explained. Manz Bothe is also convinced that the solution offers great benefits for the service provider’s everyday business. “End-to-end monitoring with Citrix EdgeSight is a supporting pillar for service level management. Our administrators now have a powerful tool to proactively manage performance and availability, and make in-depth diagnoses very quickly in the event of errors.”

Adding a third system monitoring component

At the moment, the organization is evaluating the third component of the EdgeSight product family—Citrix® EdgeSight® for Load Testing. The solution was specially designed for carrying out load and regression tests in XenApp environments. The product’s Record & Replay technology allows for the creation of test scripts without the need to master a scripting language: a click of a button in the administration console suffices to record real user activity on the screen and automatically convert it into an executable script. By setting the number of users and the test duration, user-defined load situations can be generated. “With EdgeSight for Load Testing, we can very reliably plan for the required hardware capacities and make confident statements about the behavior of applications in various load situations,” said Stein. “This information helps us, for example, in the drafting of service level agreements.”

Simplifying change management

In addition, EdgeSight for Load Testing enables the automation of regression tests, ensuring that planned system or software changes, such as the rollout of updates or patches, do not have negative impacts on the existing environment. According to Manz-Bothe, this requirement is essential for an organization such as ZRWest. “Regression tests are indispensable for regulated change management in further developing the IT infrastructure. Automation ensures that in the future we will require less time and fewer personnel for the implementation of these tests.”

About the Citrix Solution

Citrix XenApp™, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows®-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. A member of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, Citrix® NetScaler® is a purpose-built Web application delivery solution that accelerates application performance up to five times while improving security and reducing Web infrastructure costs. The Citrix® EdgeSight® product line provides the real-time visibility necessary to test, deliver and monitor the performance of Web, desktop and virtualized applications with the best end-user experience.

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