Category Archives: Optimisation
Snow and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services
Recently I have become amazed at the amount of organisations who do not have the fundamental infrastructure in place for supporting remote working. I wouldn’t want to quantify the cost for an organisation in lost labour as staff sit in traffic going nowhere, take time off for childcare needs as schools close or worse still end up dealing with an insurance claim because of a traffic accident in icy conditions. Wouldn’t you rather have employees being more productive and safer working from with full application and data access? Well the variety of options on offer from Microsoft are amazing, direct access being one solution I just could not live without. However what about the more traditional thin client access many organisations have deployed and upgraded over time?
Well interestingly I have seen a shift in the market place with the introduction of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services(RDS). Those organisations smart enough to stop and take stock of the next impending 3rd party renewal or thin client infrastructure refresh have seen that RDS is now very feature rich and capable of delivering what customers need from a traditional thin client solution. Matt McSpirit summarised it very well when he commented that you could not have imagined video content could be streamed with the Microsoft solution 18 months ago…. So the revolution is on now, organisations save money by deploying RDS and allocate it into more value add services which can only be a win win situation!!!! By the way unfortunately I don’t look out onto this tree from my home office, my view isn’t as nice but just as snowy….
Branch IT services
Choices, choices, choices… It must be confusing for a customer knowing how best to provide IT services for a branch location. Certainly local IT staff and service providers will be keen on having all the bells and whistles locally installed in the branch location. However is that the best approach for an organisation? With a mass of marketing campaigns around cloud, optimisation and deal of the century circuit upgrades for the WAN it is no wonder that confusion exists. Ultimately the best approach is consolidation and standardisation back in the HQ without impacting the service provision at the branch. Technologies do exist which can deliver reductions in IT services costs, resolve issues more quickly, and improve the productivity of employees in branch sites by centrally managing IT infrastructure. If customers can afford WAN upgrades who would object about more bandwidth but there are also technologies which can offset future spending on upgrades and improve network application responsiveness through more effective bandwidth optimisation. Finally in the current climate advising a customer you can reduce costs on physical hardware at the branch as well via virtualisation and appliances is a powerful message.
Microsoft have been involved in the development of branch appliance solutions with both Citrix and Cisco. Riverbed also provide a solution as well for optimising the WAN and also delivering local IT services. Ultimately they all provide a hardware appliance at the branch and an appliance in the HQ. Between them they optimise the network traffic going across the link utilising a variety of well documented techniques. One of the most interesting aspects is the branch appliance can host local IT services in the same hardware. This allows the delivery of all the necessary IT services which should be served locally in the branch, examples being DHCP, DNS, AD, file and print services. I know this is a simplistic overview of the technologies involved but the amount of customers I visit with complex branch IT deployments is amazing!!!
