Case Study

Centralis help Capital Radio get the party started!

Covers Citrix MetaFrame XP, Novell ZENworks 3.2 & eDirectory and Centralis AXE and Contex, Centralis consultancy & project services

The Customer

Capital Radio is the leading UK commercial radio station broadcasting to over half of the UK's adult population. Since their first broadcast by Lord Richard Attenborough on 16 October 1973, the group has grown to become the largest UK commercial radio group in terms of revenue and profit.

In the last 7 years Capital has added a further 17 stations to its original two, including BRMB, and Xtra AM in Birmingham, seven stations across the South Coast, Fox FM in Oxford, Red Dragon FM and Touch Radio in South Wales, 104.9 XFM in London, and Beat 106 based in Glasgow.

Capital has also become a leading national player in UK digital radio, setting up 30 local services across the UK, mostly delivered by XFM. Capital Interactive provides an award-winning internet presence, providing a dynamic mix of music content, branding and promotional power. Together with Capital online, Gold online, XFM online and the Network Chart, Capital Interactive demonstrates Capital’s ambition to provide the UK's premiere music sites.

	...working out of temporary office units with low bandwidth connections...Citrix Metaframe was able to provide a secure and 'user friendly' working environment for these users
	Paul Brown, Network Manager, Capital Radio

The Event: Party In The Park

Since the Birmingham station BRMB held the first Party in the Park, the open-air concerts have been adopted by many stations across the Capital group. The London event in particular has grown into the largest one day pop event in Europe.

The 2002 Party in the Park was held in Hyde Park, London on Sunday 7th July, attracting over 100,000 visitors to see some of the biggest names in world pop music including Shakira, Wyclef Jean, Westlife and Blue. The event also helped to raise over £1million for charity, through close links with the Prince’s Trust.

The Challenge

Capital Radio’s main offices are in London with other offices in Fareham, Brighton and Kent. The group have major stations in Birmingham (BRMB), Cardiff, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In 2001 when the project began, Capital Radio operated a mixture of NetWare versions plus Novell® ZENworks™ 2 for application deployment to the desktop.

The group needed to be able to access core applications from any location, including temporary headquarters such as the Party in the Park events. To provide secure access, Capital Radio remote workers have use of a Border Manager VPN connection, however this is often via 56Kb modems. To provide application delivery they had a single Windows 2000 server running Terminal Services and Citrix® MetaFrame® 1.8™, operating as part of an Active Directory running AD group policies to lock down the server. As a single server, not integrated into the eDirectory™ management solution, the implementation was very much a tactical, rather than strategic deployment. Paul Brown, Network Manager at Capital Radio comments "Leading up to and during the event, Capital Radio staff, including artist liaison, PR and online website editors were based at Hyde Park working out of temporary office units with low bandwidth connections back to our Leicester Square offices. Citrix Metaframe was able to provide a secure and 'user friendly' working environment for these users, plus we were able to give our Leicester Square IT Support staff access to shadow user sessions when issues occurred".

With limited support resources and over 1000 users to manage across multiple locations, the need for effective, directory-enabled management was fundamental to the customer infrastructure design.

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Defining the Solution

Centralis were asked to provide a strategic solution, integrating Capital Radio’s needs for a "thin client" solution for remote access with their commitment to Novell’s directory technologies.

Centralis undertook a review of Capital Radio’s infrastructure together with their current and planned business requirements and also undertook a health check on the existing Citrix server.

Through this exercise, carried out with Capital Radio IT staff, it became clear that a number of improvements could be made.

• Firstly, the MetaFrame solution did not have the required level of resilience, and Centralis recommended building a Citrix MetaFrame server farm, upgraded to MetaFrame XP FR1 and built to best practice standards.  The farm would provide resilience, and the upgrade would have the added benefits of improved performance and better integration features.
   
• Secondly, Centralis proposed that all the application installations to the Citrix servers should be undertaken using ZENworks snAPPshots, processed and optimised for the Citrix MetaFrame environment using Centralis AXE.  This would ensure the standardisation of the applications and servers, and reduce support and management overheads.
   
• Finally, it was agreed that the whole solution could be simplified by the removal of Active Directory, which was only used for management of the Citrix MetaFrame environment.  Centralis proposed to manage the users through the ZENworks feature of Dynamic Local User (DLU).  This would have the dual benefit of removing a layer of management, and in providing excellent integration with Capital Radios strategic direction of directory-enabled management.

Delivering the Solution

Having completed the architecture and design work Centralis commenced the project to deploy the new solution. To ensure continuity of service, the existing Active Directory was left installed in the production environment until the pilot solution had been fully tested and proven, delivering all the required applications and services.

The project proceeded with Centralis project staff:

• Taking SnAPPshots of the key applications, which were:
   
  • IE5.5 SP2
  • Microsoft Office 2000
  • Oracle 8.1.6 Client
  • SQL Server based applications
  • Agresso
  • GroupWise Client
  • Crystal Reports
  • Utility software including anti-virus

  The resulting .AXT files were processed using Centralis AXE, then installed for both server and users via Novell’s ZENworks for Desktops.

• Rebuilding the existing production Citrix MetaFrame server using Citrix and Centralis best practises based on Windows 2000 Standard Server (service pack 2) with Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame XPe Feature Release 1.  A second server built to this specification was also added into the Citrix Server Farm to provide load balancing and resilience.
   
• Working alongside Capital Radio’s IT staff to transfer key support skills, and to ensure that the solution was fully understood and accepted by the staff who would be responsible for it. All the server builds and application installations were also fully documented to Centralis standards, for Capital Radio’s use in supporting the solution.
   
• At the end of the project the customer was able to remove the Domain Users accounts and the Active Directory, and use the ZENworks managed policies and Dynamic Local User.

Peter Wilkins, Technical Director at Centralis comments "DLU is not a solution for every customer, but for those with a Novell based architecture, and no requirements or plans to implement Active Directory, it offers a highly effective directory-enabled solution. It removes the complexity of multiple directories, providing a single point of management through eDirectory."

Benefits to the Customer

The overall solution has provided Capital Radio with a number of important benefits:

• The new Citrix server farm provides the resilience, flexibility and performance required to access their centralised solutions from any location
   
• The integration solution from Centralis provides centralised management of users and applications from the NDS
   
• Users have single sign-on from their PCs to their Citrix session via pass-through authentication
   
• Capital Radio have been able to remove their Active Directory and the associated management costs.

	Providing users with a desktop environment to which they are used to and being able to manage each one centrally is of major benefit to Capital Radio.
	Paul Brown, Network Manager, Capital Radio

Reviewing the benefits of the new solution, Paul Brown comments "Providing users with a desktop environment to which they are used to and being able to manage each one centrally is of major benefit to Capital Radio. Support and application deployment are always resource hungry operations, however our current Citrix environment has enabled us to allocate this resource elsewhere. Our major concern when implementing Citrix to a user base of approx. 60 users for use on the WAN was the integration of NDS, as Capital Radio is a heavy Novell user. Centralis were able to provide us with the knowledge and technical expertise to integrate NDS with Win2000 and Citrix – Two clicks of a mouse and our NDS users are able to login to the Citrix farm using their current NDS credentials. Password synchronisation is also taken care of with the use of Dynamic Local Users –Fantastic!"

Conclusions

For Capital Radio, their commitment to Novell’s directory enabled technologies has always offered high reliability and centralised administration.

Adding the thin client based solution based on Citrix MetaFrame technology has added the flexibility to deliver their applications to remote sites and to key events such as the Party in the Park.

Exchanging their Active Directory for Novell managed policies and Dynamic Local User may seem a bold move, but it has ensured a simpler, lower cost infrastructure, with no loss of functionality.

The final word goes to the customer, Paul Brown "We are extremely pleased with our Citrix Metaframe implementation. This solution provides us with a centrally managed system using our current technologies (NDS). Users are restricted to only the applications that they require and this is provided by use of NDS groups and NAL delivered desktops, which means no additional IT training for staff on products such as Active Directory. In particular we would not have been able to roll out our group Sales application (SQL server in London) on the current WAN without upgrading all bandwidth connections –With Citrix, this application runs as if it were local to the user. I look forward to working with Centralis again in the very near future."

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