With the public sector expected to be subject to severe cost controls after the next General Election, councils throughout the UK will be looking to cut spending across the board, with IT not exempt from those plans.

At Surrey County Council (SCC), a new desktop strategy has helped take important steps in that direction already.

The local authority needed to address performance issues, reduce power requirements and costs, and support an increase in mobile users, and decided to replace a legacy Windows 2000 environment used by more than half its 6,000 desktops across 300 sites.

SCC provides services to 1.1 million Surrey residents, and its Information Management and Technology (IMT) department delivers IT to 8,000 users. To roll out its new desktop strategy to those workers, 10 per cent of whom were mobile, SCC worked with IT consultancy Centralis.

SCC technical architect Peter Sullivan said that historically the council had Windows 2000 running on all desktop systems with Novell's file-and-print infrastructure at the back-end, which was also being used for application delivery.

“What we found was that that although this worked fine for LAN sites, for remote sites such as fire stations and day care centres we have situated all over the county, it wasn't so good,” said Sullivan.

SCC had developed a Citrix-based solution earlier which delivered good performance and reliability and was suitable for specific users in particular locations. The organisation decided to roll out a new project called Citrix New Horizon to a much wider spread of its employees.

SCC’s network infrastructure management was outsourced to Cable & Wireless, and had network speeds of 256Kbit/s at the low end to up to 100Mbit/s at the top.

“We couldn't afford to put 100Mbit/s links to everyone, so ideally we needed a solution that worked over low bandwidth links,” said Sullivan.

SCC’s remote workers had a limited set of applications, or if they used Novell's XenWorks tools to deliver more applications, Sullivan said they had to wait a long time before all the application files needed were copied over to the local system.

“With Citrix you don't have to do that copying, so it's much faster. Basically our infrastructure wasn't matched up with the bandwidth needs of the applications,” he said.

Rolling out the Citrix New Horizon project could not be done with SCC’s own datacentres - one in the Kingston-upon-Thames headquarters, and one in Guildford - because they were at the limit on power and air conditioning. So the server farm running Citrix New Horizon was hosted at Cable & Wireless's datacentre.

Centralis worked with SCC's IMT department to plan, design and implement the servers capable of delivering core applications to both fat- and thin- client platforms. The system was built on Citrix's XenApp Enterprise Edition and Citrix EdgeSight, although SCC also used bespoke Centralis software and virtual channels for content redirection.

"We have more than 200 virtual servers running on 32 physical boxes, all based on VMware at the Cable & Wireless datacentre, but we’re planning to do a lot more virtualisation ourselves, and we have plans to consolidate hardware in our own datacentres,” said Sullivan.

One of the reasons for implementing Citrix New Horizon was that SCC wanted to roll out SAP’s Social Care solution to employees desktops, but that application did not deliver everything the council wanted, said Sullivan.

"So we didn't roll it out, but by then we'd already set up the Citrix server farm,” he said.

Since SCC’s desktop strategy meant rolling out more of the Citrix system it had developed, that more than compensated for the problems with the SAP Social Care application.

SCC uses Lotus Notes as its email client, shared storage and SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The authority can now deliver SAP ERP applications through the server farm. SCC has about 1,500 people using the Citrix New Horizon system, which it intends to grow in the next 12 to 18 months to possibly 4,500 users. And as with a number of public sector councils, SCC also uses SAP for finance, procurement and HR.

SCC is signed up to Government Connect, the public sector secure network, but part of the reason it had trouble achieving certification was due to the original Windows 2000 systems still on some of desktops.

“I expect that the Citrix New Horizon project rollout will alleviate those problems,” said Sullivan.

The Citrix New Horizon Project meant that SCC now has a dynamic datacentre running 205 virtual servers, operating Citrix over VMware in a hosted environment.

“Operating across 300 sites, we also needed a greater degree of flexibility, so centralising all our servers and file storage in one place will improve accessibility and productivity levels," said Sullivan.

For the future, SCC is planning to implement a mobile solution on top of its new platform to try to improve performance for mobile workers, while helping to cut costs.