Brent Council reduces IT power consumption by 80% through the use of desktop virtualisation

“We knew a thin client solution would be ideal from both a user and an IT perspective,” explained Prod Sarigianis, Head of IT Service Transition at Brent Council. “It would facilitate home working and hotdesking, key elements of the council’s strategy. It would also be easier to manage and, importantly, would enable us to provide a consistent user interface and improved support to Brent staff. So the new Civic Centre was the perfect focus for us to implement new ways of working and obtain these benefits.”

Additional drivers were efficiency and sustainability. As well as saving the Borough money, the new Civic Centre aimed to be the greenest public sector building in the UK, with the highest possible BREEAM rating of “outstanding”, and Brent wanted to limit the power consumption of at least 70% of desktops to under 30W. This could not be achieved using traditional PCs.

Brent needed additional support to design and implement a new infrastructure, and so ran a public tender to select an IT partner. They chose Fordway for both the strength of its proposed technical solution, which achieved the highest technical score of all the tenders, and Fordway’s experience in implementing large desktop roll-outs for other public sector organisations.

The solution
Fordway recommended a solution based on Quest vWorkspace supported by Microsoft HyperV Server, combined with Dell Server hardware and Dell Compellent SAN arrays at Brent’s two data centres to provide a fully resilient back end solution. The design was a hybrid of virtual desktops (VDI) and terminal services (enhanced remote session host or RDSH). Microsoft AppV was used to package the majority of applications, which would be streamed to both VDI and RDSH desktops. This enables a mix of standard and specialist applications to be run on a single server without conflict, reducing the number of servers required.

The implementation had to include roll-out of Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. Fordway’s approach leveraged Brent’s existing infrastructure and licenses as much as possible to reduce costs, and minimised the number of servers and storage required to reduce overall power consumption. The infrastructure was designed to provide improved resilience, with no single point of failure.

“By choosing a best of breed solution we could design a green infrastructure which met all Brent’s needs,” explained Richard Blanford, Fordway managing director. “We had to provide appropriate desktop services for a range of user groups, each with different requirements, so it was vital to avoid a ‘one size fits all’ approach. This solution delivers the appropriate functionality to each user group while providing a single management and administrative procedure.”

The project began with detailed design and analysis. Fordway used Liquidware’s VDI tool to assess user needs and determine the optimal delivery model for each user: thin client terminal services (RDSH), VDI, full PC or notebook. The solution had to be compatible with a range of peripherals, from printers to library barcode readers and screen readers.

The analysis looked at average and maximum user numbers to size the infrastructure. It had to ensure a high performance, reliable desktop service for all users while minimising operational and management overhead and providing failover and resilience. There had been ongoing issues with the existing infrastructure, such as slow and unreliable user logon. It was vital that the new infrastructure provided quick start-up and a consistent user experience across all applications. Brent has 3,500 users, and after examining user concurrency data the new infrastructure was sized to support 2,700 concurrent users.

The original tender had assumed a split of 30% VDI and 70% terminals, but after the analysis the appropriate mix was determined to be closer to 10%: 90%, which resulted in a much more economical solution. Cost often prevents organisations using VDI, as VDI desktops are more expensive both to buy and to maintain. By ensuring VDI was only provided to users who really needed it Fordway was able to keep costs down while retaining the benefits and flexibility, thus improving the return on investment.

With design signed off, the next stage was to build a proof of concept environment, pilot it and roll it out for an initial 250 users. Fordway designed a custom image and front end to enable users to access sessions, including providing special needs accessibility as part of the user shell.

The proof of concept ran for three months and quickly won over council staff. “Users were delighted – they forgot that they were using a thin client environment as it’s completely seamless, and it eliminated historical issues such as slow logins,” explained Prod. “A lot of our users also appreciate that we’re implementing a much greener solution.” The Brent team completed the roll-out to all users, with Fordway providing third line support as required.

The benefits
One key benefit is reduced power consumption – contributing significantly to the new Civic Centre’s green credentials. The 10Zig thin client terminals use just 14-15W of power per desktop, compared with 80W or more for a standard desktop PC. Additional power savings come from intelligent user management, such as automatically suspending some servers overnight.

The terminals also reduce hardware costs and materials use, as they are expected to last a minimum of seven years. In comparison, Brent’s replacement life for PCs was five years and this was considered ambitious, as many local authorities work on a replacement life of three or four years. Total cost of ownership is significantly reduced, potentially providing a 40% saving on what Brent previously paid for full PC clients.

The desktop solution provides location independent working, enabling home working (reducing travel) and hotdesking, while removing the need to provide laptops to some 400 users. It also improves security because information stays in the data centre, not on user terminals. It has the ability to support BYOD, allowing secure remote desktop from iPads.

Brent’s IT team can now respond much more quickly to desktop support issues, the majority of which can be solved by the support team correcting the user session on the server while the user is on the phone. This eliminates the need for an engineer’s visit and reduces costs, while providing improved support and quality of service to users. There is a single point of management, and the solution is flexible and scalable – it is easy to add new users, and every element can scale to at least five times the initially proposed capacity by adding standard components into the live environment.

Through the project, Fordway and Brent’s Information Technology Unit have contributed significantly to Brent Council’s aim of becoming a more sustainable and greener local authority. As well as dramatically reducing power consumption, the project has cut the council’s carbon footprint, helped to reduce waste, and will promote flexibility and efficiency.

Next steps
Since completing the desktop transformation project Fordway has implemented a network infrastructure and associated security at the Civic Centre and Brent’s data centre in partnership with Juniper and Symantec. The project is being delivered using the same PRINCE2 project management methodology, and is compatible with the Civic Centre’s BREEAM “Outstanding” rating.