Covering 7,100 square kilometers and occupying about a sixth of the entire Swiss territory, the Canton of Graubünden is the largest canton in Switzerland in terms of area. It is deemed one of the most attractive tourist regions in the Alps, not only because of its well-known winter sports centers such as St. Moritz, Arosa, Davos and Klosters, but also because of 150 valleys, 615 lakes and 937 mountaintops that lure around 12 million guests to the southeast of Switzerland each year.

The administration of the Canton exhibits a few distinctions: Graubünden is the only Swiss canton with three official languages–-German, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic. In addition, historically, the community autonomy in Graubünden is very strongly developed: the communities and districts make decisions independently in many areas. For example, they determine their official and school languages autonomously for their region.

The capital of the Canton of Graubünden is Chur. The Agency for Information Technology–-the central information technology service provider for the cantonal administration–-also has its headquarters here. The agency’s 35 employees support the various agencies for the canton by evaluating and implementing IT projects, hosting numerous applications in their own datacenter, and overseeing data and voice networks.

The Challenge: Centralizing Application Provisioning to Streamline IT

The Agency for Information Technology functions not only as an IT service provider for all organizations of the cantonal administration, but also for many communities in Graubünden. For example, the office handles large print jobs centrally and provides the communal administration with applications for typical functions such as tax computation through the datacenter.

The Agency for Information Technology has been using Citrix Presentation Server™ for many years to deliver applications to approximately 1,000 clients within the cantonal administration, as well as more than 500 workstations in the communities. “Overall, we deliver several hundred different applications from our datacenter,” said Fernando Caduff, acting director of the Agency for Information Technology. “The central operation relieves the cantonal agencies and the affiliated municipal administration significantly, since the applications do not have to be locally installed and maintained on the terminals. In addition, Citrix technology provides high application performance over narrow bandwidths–-this is an important consideration in our large canton with many scattered locations.”

In the run-up to the 2007 Swiss National Board elections, the agency implemented Citrix Access Gateway™, Advanced Edition for secure delivery of central compilation software to 180 voting bureaus. Since then, the Citrix SSL VPN solution has been expanded to provide secure delivery of data compilation applications for all elections and polls in the canton. In addition, employees who want to work from home can connect to the Citrix Presentation Server environment over the Web via Access Gateway. Likewise, external companies that carry out service contracts for the cantonal administration receive temporary access to specific systems via Access Gateway. With the SmartAccess technology that is featured in the Citrix solution, the IT staff can automatically assign graduated user rights for external users based on their computing scenario.

Implementing Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters

Caduff is convinced that centralized application delivery will continue to become more important. “In the future, it will be one of our primary functions to provide applications via the datacenter for various user groups. We will play an important role here for cantonal organizations and communities as a service provider in many of the planned e-government initiatives.”

In order to be able to react even more quickly to new application requests in the future, the Agency for Information Technology implemented Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters. With this solution, complete server workloads–-server operating system, Citrix Presentation Server software, applications and server settings–-can be streamed from a storage system to a physical or virtual server. Any number of servers can be booted over the network from one standard image. A simple reboot is sufficient in order to push out an updated image or even an entirely different server workload.

“We delved into the new technology at an early stage, because we were searching for a solution that would allow us to quickly and easily upgrade our existing Citrix Presentation Server farm to a new hardware platform,” explained Otto Baer, system administrator in the agency.

The server farm in Chur currently comprises 27 servers, which are allocated to nine different application silos for different departments or customer groups. With Citrix Provisioning Server, the Agency for Information Technology is in a position to carry out a smooth transfer to new blade server hardware. The administrators create a standard image for each of the nine silos and the new hardware only has to be configured for the network booting process. The rollout of an application silo to multiple servers can be completed within a couple of minutes.

Hardware Reductions and Fast Rollouts without Risk

The upgrade of the entire server farm is not yet completed; however, Baer is already excited about the possibilities offered by the solution: “With Citrix Provisioning Server, we not only save ourselves days and days of installation work, but we also ensure that all the servers within an application grouping are absolutely consistent. A tool specifically for software allocation is not necessary, which means there is also one fewer product to manage.”

Provisioning Server also helps the organization decrease hardware costs. For one thing, the new blade servers do not require their own hard drives, since no data whatsoever has to be stored locally. Second, the number of servers can be reduced in the future from 27 to 20. Previously, a reserve server was factored in for each silo; now, two servers suffice as back-up for the entire farm. These servers can be rapidly integrated into any grouping in the case of a hardware failure or increased load.

For Caduff, the solution fulfills the requirements of the agency for as dynamic an infrastructure as possible. “Citrix Provisioning Server not only gives us greater flexibility in the datacenter, but also adds the benefit of sustainable, reduced costs of storage, server hardware and administration. In addition, in future projects such as the planned upgrade to Windows Server 2008, we will profit from the ability to carry out risk-free rollouts and rollbacks.”

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