When this corrugated packaging solutions manufacturer needed help streamlining its 45 office locations and 3,000-some users into a unified and virtualized environment, it turned to value-added reseller (VAR), THConsultants Inc., for help.
Montreal-based Norampac Inc., is a North American packaging division of Cascades Canada Inc., a company that specializes in pulp and paper solutions. Dominic Dore, corporate director of IT at Norampac, said the company worked with local VAR, THConsultants, which is a Platinum-level Citrix partner, to implement a centralized and virtualized infrastructure.
“We were trying to lower our total cost of ownership (TCO) and the amount of IT infrastructure we had,” Dore said. “We had to be agile and we wanted to consolidate our IT support, infrastructure and service for our 45 sites and about 3,000 users. We don’t have any IT staff at any of our sites, so it was becoming hard to remotely support and service all of our users before we moved to a virtualized environment.”
With so many locations across North America, Dore said the company’s infrastructure was decentralized, so things such as e-mail and software was being deployed locally on each PC machine. It was so difficult to troubleshoot these PCs on a remote-basis that the company found itself having to have spare PCs on hand, in the event of an IT problem. Because of these challenges, Dore said the company began looking at transitioning to a virtualized environment.
With THConsultants’ help and using one of Cascades’ data centres, Norampac eventually began replacing PC machines with thin clients and moved its servers, applications and data offsite and into the data centre.
At the backbone of this new infrastructure lies Citrix XenApp products said Todd Hsu, president of THConsultants. The implementation process first began about two and a half years ago, Dore said. The company is currently about 70 per cent of the way in with the new infrastructure, with plans for the company to be operating the full Citrix environment by the beginning of next year, Dore added.
“We created a virtual infrastructure using virtual servers and with no configuration,” Hsu said. “We also leveraged Citrix XenApp technology so Norampac can now deliver applications to users without having to use so many resources. Security is also improved with a virtualized infrastructure since these are dumb terminals with no information on them.”
Leveraging a virtual infrastructure has made Norampac employees more agile now when it comes to support and more easily accessible, Dore said. A virtual architecture also allows Norampac to grow and scale on an on-demand basis, he explained.
“Now when users need software, instead of having to ship it over on a CD to the user, we can now deploy it virtually and within minutes to end-users,” Dore said. “We’re also saving on our TCO because thin clients cost less over the years than traditional PCs do and also they use less energy.”
Hsu says being a Citrix partner, working in the virtualization space has been a “perfect business” for his company as a VAR.
“In general, this is the perfect business to be in for VARs because it gives us the chance to succeed and to take advantage of a down economy, when people are trying to cut costs and be lean by centralizing their resources,” Hsu said.
