Once virtualisation takes hold in the imagination of IT architects, it seems it cannot be stopped. Virtualisation has begun its spread from servers and storage to the desktop and applications, with large customers perhaps having the most to gain.

Property consultancy Knight Frank is one. It claims to be the world’s largest privately owned global property firm with 207 offices in 43 nations (including 63 in the UK) and 6,300 employees, handling £594bn in commercial, agricultural and residential real estate each year.

But with a widely distributed workforce, management of some 90 applications was becoming extremely time-consuming and costly. Troubleshooting, upgrades and maintenance needed to become more efficient, especially to ensure security and consistency across the organisation.

Effective solution
The in-house infrastructure IT team of eight decided that application virtualisation would help and hired London-based services and solution provider Intercept.

Nigel Woods, Intercept’s technical director, said that even companies with a virtualisation track record are falling down when it comes to application virtualisation, due to its complexity.

“Server virtualisation is today almost a done deal,” he said. “The only difference is that people are looking at the price of VMware and asking what the alternative is to that ­ but that’s pretty standard.

“Yet application virtualisation is the biggest piece of the jigsaw.”

The Knight Frank project has been a long process, although the application virtualisation part of it came together quickly. Knight Frank deployed Citrix infrastructure originally in 2003 and application virtualisation started around 2005. Citrix XenApp is the hub for centralisation of desktop applications, while Microsoft App-V was selected as the virtualisation tool.

“We are doing a presentation at IP Expo this week where we will deploy an app to more than 1,600 people in 20 minutes,” said Woods. “It is usually about a two- to three-month job to deploy an app.

Eighty central Citrix XenApp Presentation Servers were used to move applications from client PCs to the data centre. This multi-stage phase of the project took 12 months, and improved management and control for Knight Frank’s IT team.

Then Microsoft’s Application Virtualisation (App-V) software ­ acquired in the takeover of Softricity ­ was deployed, simplifying application deployment and reducing application conflicts.

Successful outcomes
The benefits are obvious. Management, deployment and testing times are hugely reduced, making system upgrades not only quicker but much cheaper. This offers a business customer improved agility and flexibility in a rapidly changing market.

Disaster recovery has also improved, because applications are now available from multiple servers. In addition, users have a more consistent experience, because applications no longer need to operate on individual machines.

“If you deploy 1,600 desktops, normally you will find that maybe 1,200 will work perfectly, 200 won’t work, and 200 might work sometimes,” said Woods.

Dan Atkinson, IT architect at Knight Frank, said that Intercept’s focus on involving customers at every step gave it an edge. “It is really about trust. It is that trusted adviser,” he said.

Channel gears up for VDI boom
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