Centralis Case Study Rugby Football Union

Summary

When the RFU was looking to deploy it's elite player assessment system to clubs and remote locations throughout England it turned to Citrix solution partner Centralis to optimise the performance and reliability - and to resolve those all important printing problems.

About the Customer

The Rugby Football Union is the governing body for the Game in England and comprises of approximately 2,000 clubs, 27 Constituent Bodies (Counties), the Armed Forces, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities and Students.

The RFU currently has over three hundred permanent staff working from its headquarters in Twickenham and in regional Schools and Referees centre in Wolverhampton.

The Challenge

The RFU has been working closely with Centralis, a Citrix Solution Advisor Platinum partner, to implement its Elite Player Analysis System (EPAS) on a Citrix application delivery platform.  The EPAS system, which includes player’s electronic medical records and information on their fitness and development tracking, is now being delivered to all England rugby academies, premiership rugby clubs and centrally at the RFU’s headquarters at Twickenham.

Ewen Anderson, Managing Director at Centralis said: "Providing EPAS using Citrix application delivery has given the RFU a secure, reliable and scalable platform for its elite player IT system. We worked closely with the team at the RFU to identify and develop the most effective system configuration to optimise performance and reliability."

Centralis initially carried out a health check on the RFU system which reviewed the existing Citrix deployment against best practices and investigated printing and application performance issues. The health check concluded that, to optimise performance, the system needed to be migrated to the latest version to take advantage of the significant improvements in resilience, user experience and printing.

The Centralis Solution

Mike Morris, Network Manager at RFU said: "It was vital that the EPAS system remained available to existing users throughout the development process. The migration programme Centralis developed ensured continual access to the system throughout the migration, allowing our users to access vital information at all times."

The new system allows the use of Resource Manager for recording session statistics and for effective server monitoring through integration with Microsoft® Operations Manager. The two main player databases available through EPAS were published via a Web Interface and Secure Gateway combination using the Secure Web Access build developed by Centralis security consultants.

The new build also hardens the default Windows server build to guard against attacks from external sources on the Internet.

With EPAS now delivering a consistent and reliable service the RFU is planning to develop the system to cover all playing aspects of England and Premiership teams.

The Benefits to the Customer

The new system is already delivering huge benefits.  "By migrating to the new version we have increased the number of users that can access EPAS at any one time, dramatically improved session reliability and resolved all the printing issues." said Mike Morris.
 

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