High speed and guaranteed sportswear supported by Citrix solutions

The challenge – Ensure available business applications all over the world

O’Neill Europe has used Citrix® XenApp™ since 2004 to create a standardized remote workplace, which is used in Warmond as well at all distributor locations around the world. This published virtualized desktop running on XenApp enables all employees to be able to use all applications including the product lifecycle software PDM Quest. Two Citrix® Access Gateway™ appliances provided off-site subsidiaries on-demand access to the XenApp-based remote workplace.

The expanding organization was looking for a way to increase availability and provide full redundant solutions to remote users of the Citrix environment, web servers and web applications. “The Citrix environment already proved to be a very efficient way to deliver virtual desktops and individual applications, and was very stable, but we started looking for a way to increase availability on a global scale and for all web-based applications,” said Peter Maljaars, Global IT Service and Infrastructure Manager at O’Neill Europe. “In addition, more recently, we started experiencing performance issues with the connection from the datacenter in the Netherlands to Hong Kong. We needed a solution to increase the performance of the remote workplace and for regular file transfers for our Hong Kong employees.”

Implementing NetScaler and Branch Repeater

The IT department at O´Neill narrowed the shortlist to Citrix® NetScaler® and a product from another manufacturer. A proof of concept with both solutions was done to evaluate the effect of global load balancing technology on the performance and availability of the infrastructure. NetScaler was selected because it was integrated with the XenApp environment and could be used as a replacement upgrade for Access Gateway. The NetScaler setup and deployment was a very intuitive process with a minimal learning curve and was done by the O´Neill IT staff. The NetScaler 7000 HA active-passive cluster load balances and accelerates the XenApp-based remote workplace and numerous web applications.

To improve the performance issues with Hong Kong, the Citrix® Branch Repeater™ was extensively tested during a four month timeframe. Again, the solution was compared to devices from other manufacturers. Branch Repeater proved best suited for accelerating the Citrix ICA-protocol used by XenApp. Installing and configuring the device in the production environment took O´Neill only a few days. The device for Hong Kong was configured in the Netherlands and sent to Hong Kong where it only needed to be switched on to be in production. The device is managed remotely. Now, two Branch Repeaters accelerate the high latency WAN connection to Hong Kong.

The always available remote workplace

The company especially needed a high availability solution to make sure the remote workplace is always-on. “Before we used NetScaler, there were incidents were the environment was not available four times a week. When there is no IT personnel available at the moment of occurrence—for example at night during weekends—it means unacceptable downtime of our external application for all remote offices like Hong Kong and remote users at contract companies that manufacture O´Neill´s clothing all over the world, from the Middle East to India to South Africa,” Maljaars continued. “With NetScaler, we not only have a remote workplace with XenApp that is load balanced and always available, also important web applications like our product focus system application used for BI information and planning now have a failover function that was previously impossible without manual intervention by the IT staff.”

In addition to global load balancing, the NetScaler provides web application acceleration and secure application delivery services. Because the NetScaler offloads SSL encryption and decryption, it frees the web servers of this workload, resulting in improved user response times. “Acceleration and optimization for web applications is a very nice feature. We add more and more applications to be accelerated to the NetScaler configuration,” added Maljaars. “Now we also accelerate Outlook Web Access, for example, and our BCS application for DHL (software to track and trace our distribution), and the Microsoft SharePoint web site for the  worldwide organization (WWO) project. The system administration of the NetScaler devices is very easy and takes almost no additional time.”

O´Neill replaced Access Gateway and upgraded the solution to NetScaler. The same device that load balances, accelerates and optimizes is used for application delivery using SSL VPN. O´Neill integrated Safeword tokens with the NetScaler for additional authentication.

Fast application performance to Hong Kong

Branch Repeater is less expensive than upgrading a leased line connection, although upgrading the connection would probably not solve for the latency problem completely. O´Neill calculated a maximum Return On Investment of a year and a half.

The user experience for the virtual workplace from Hong Kong was becoming terrible but Branch Repeater solved this problem. With extensive support for the ICA protocol, the virtual workplace with Quest PDM is now running smoothly in Hong Kong from the datacenter in Warmond. “O´Neill uses the Quest PDM application for handling the complete creative and production processes, from designing and drawing clothes to generating bills of material and quality control in factories. Good performance is extremely important for our business,” concluded Maljaars. “Citrix Branch Repeater has enabled us to accelerate the performance of key applications by up to eight times. By providing 65 percent compression, Branch Repeater also helps us to better use and provision the existing bandwidth. Best of all, the user experience has improved by a factor of 10. Branch Repeater adds the final touch to NetScaler and XenApp in giving the best possible application performance, for employees anywhere in the world.”

In addition, O´Neill accelerates file transfer traffic with FTP from the Netherlands to the factories in Hong Kong. Measurements show that only 20 percent of the initial file size needs to be transferred over the connection.