St. James’s Place Ltd offers a wide range of high-quality wealth management services to businesses and individuals. With more than 400,000 clients and more than £17.6 billion under management, it is one of the United Kingdom’s leading wealth management organizations. St. James’s Place is 60-per cent owned by HBOS plc, a major UK company. HBOS provides retail, business and corporate banking, and insurance and investment services to 23 million customers through its multi-brand strategy in the UK and internationally.

St. James’s Place has an IT staff of 33 who deliver multiple IT projects and manage 120 servers located in two datacentres — one for testing and disaster recovery and one for production. Thirty are Citrix Presentation Servers used for delivering SWIFT, a complex, customized electronic business submission application used by St. James’s partners for entering and processing customer transactions. The Citrix Presentation Server™ environment supports 450-500 concurrent users.

The Challenge: Simplifying and Standardizing Updates to a Key Application

Nick Holden, head of St. James’s IT Operations Division, said the company sought to solve several recurrent operational, cost and business-risk challenges, along with issues of server performance and user satisfaction related to delivery of the SWIFT application. As the number of Presentation Servers grew from six to 30, updating and maintaining the SWIFT application became increasingly complex and time-consuming, and was putting a drain on staff resources. Also, St. James’s Place encountered server-build consistency problems with each SWIFT update rollout, resulting in application downtime and leaving the business “at significant risk” because partners did not have access to a critically important application for hours at a time. Finally, because all 30 servers deliver the same mission-critical business application, it is important for user satisfaction that each server deliver a consistently excellent experience, something Holden said was proving to be problematic.

Implementing Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters

The St. James’s Place IT team explored a variety of strategies to solve these challenges, including testing a number of virtualisation, application-streaming and ghosting products, each of which proved to be either unworkable or too unwieldy.

None could meet all three of St. James’s success criteria — smoothly integrate with Presentation Server and the complex SWIFT application; be portable between the test and production environment for delivery of a quick, smooth rollout that didn’t involve countless hours rebuilding production servers; and provide roll-back functionality that would eliminate application downtime in the event a software rollout was compromised and St. James’s needed to revert to the previous production image.

Additional research turned up Citrix Provisioning Server™ for Datacenters, which virtualises the server image and then streams the entire server workload on demand from network storage. “It seemed promising when we first heard about it, but we were sceptical — particularly about the impact that streaming the entire server would have on the network,” said Holden. A two-month pilot eliminated St. James’s network-overload concerns and scepticism. “Very quickly we proved that we could solve our biggest challenges with this technology.”

Working with Citrix UK partners — IQ-Sys Ltd., and Point to Point — St. James’s Place purchased Citrix Provisioning Server for Datacenters. This solution delivers server workloads — the operating system, application engine and application — on demand to physical or virtual servers via streaming technology. The server workload image is virtualised and streamed to the target servers. No software is pre-installed or permanently loaded on the servers.

Risk-free Application Update Process/Application Roll-back Capability

According to Holden, the time and productivity savings since the implementation of Provisioning Server for Datacenters are “very clear and measurable…a tremendous return on investment for us in terms of people time. Previously when we deployed an update it would take four to six of our people more than 10 hours to get the job done.”

He continued, “With Provisioning Server, we know we can deliver a new version of the software to all 30 servers in six minutes. We build and test a new image in our test environment and then we can immediately port that image to the production environment and stream the single image to all 30 servers. We’re no longer spending days rebuilding servers and hours chasing down server discrepancies. And if we ever did encounter a problem, we can roll back very easily now by rebooting to the previous working image, which we have in our library of images. That capability is reassuring and of course very valuable from a disaster recovery point of view.”

Improved Server Performance and User Experience

“Previously we updated every server individually and were always discovering image discrepancies from server to server, even after huge amounts of testing. No matter what we did, we could not get every server correct and consistent. Now, because we are streaming the single image to all servers, we can be 100-per cent sure the server image is always consistent. That’s a very big change for us and saves significant amounts of time,” said Holden.

St. James’s user satisfaction has increased. “Before Provisioning Server we would get lots of service calls from users who would say things like ‘I’m on Citrix 14 now and when I was on Citrix 12, it was much faster. What’s happening?’ Now, because there are no performance discrepancies among servers, we’re able to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. We’ve eliminated these types of calls,” said Holden.

The performance of Provisioning Server has provided the impetus for St. James’s to consider utilising it elsewhere in the datacentre. “We are looking at some additional possibilities, including perhaps using it to stream desktops in a virtual desktop scenario,” said Holden.

By delivering server workloads dynamically rather than deploying them statically on each server, Provisioning Server dramatically reduces the cost of datacentre operations and management, eliminates risks associated with workload rollouts, simplifies IT management and increases the ability to respond to business demands.

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