Surrey County Council is rolling out a new desktop platform to 8,000 of its workers. The Council is switching to thin-client terminals underpinned by Citrix during 2009-11.
The Council will be replacing up to 6,000 desktops across 300 sites. The legacy system was built on PCs running Windows 2000 and the Council wanted a system that costs less, uses less power, is more reliable and enables remote working. Up to 10% of the Council’s workers are mobile.
The Council uses SAP for finance, procurement and HR applications and found that when a client upgrade was needed, the software was too big to roll out using traditional methods. This prompted the Council to search for a new platform.
Peter Sullivan, technical architect at Surrey County Council, said: “We recognised that our desktop strategy was becoming unwieldy and out-of-date and we needed to ensure that application upgrade and management costs didn’t escalate. Operating across 300 sites, we also needed a greater degree of flexibility. Centralising all our servers and file storage in one place will improve accessibility and productivity levels.”
The project is called Citrix New Horizons and is built on Citrix XenApp Enterprise Edition and Citrix EdgeSight. The Council worked with Centralis to plan, design and implement a Citrix server farm capable of delivering apps to both fat- and thin-clients. The Council now operates a dynamic data centre running 205 virtual servers operating Citrix over VMware in a hosted environment designed by Centralis.
“Surrey County Council is one of the largest and most progressive Local Authorities in the country. It is imperative that its IT systems are flexible, agile and secure to allow it to continue providing first-class services into the next decade and beyond,” said Rob Greenslade, sales director at Centralis.
Surrey County Council serves about 1.1 million residents across the county, which is in the south east of England.
