Salvation Army

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When one of the UK’s best known and oldest Christian charities works in the community, its staff rely on a thin client infrastructure to deliver social services to some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The ease of management and security of this approach is leading The Salvation Army to extend and enhance its virtual desktop infrastructure with the latest Wyse Cloud Client Computing solutions. The Salvation Army is one of the largest, most diverse providers of social services in the UK after the Government. Founded in East London in 1865, The Salvation Army is both a church and registered charity that demonstrates its Christian principles through social welfare provision.

Viewpoint

‘When you’re supporting so many users in so many different locations finding a new way to make the desktops easier to manage strongly appealed and led us to switch to a Wyse thin client infrastructure at the grass roots.’MARTYN CROFT CIO

THE SALVATION ARMY UK TERRITORY WITH THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND

Not for Profit

Case Study

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Registered charity numbers England & Wales 214779, 215174, in Scotland SC009359, SC037691, and Republic of Ireland CHY6399

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The challenge

Wyse thin clients meet business requirements The best known part of the Army’s social work is its network of homeless people hostels around the country. These have evolved to become Lifehouses that offer activities and training to help improve clients’ self-esteem, mental health and employment prospects. The centres are helping to break the cycle of homelessness and transform lives with people re-housed, reunited with their families and getting back into work.

The refocusing of its social welfare works has happened almost in parallel with an equally radical departure from traditional desktop computing for its staff in the Lifehouses and social centres.

As Martyn Croft, CIO, The Salvation Army UK Territory with the Republic of Ireland, explains: “Like any charity working with vulnerable people, information technology plays an important supporting role in how we work with individuals to rebuild their lives. But, we realised that traditional set up of personal computers, a server and network connection was not the best way of delivering information services.”

The biggest challenge was how to manage individual set-ups of desktops and servers in over 120 very diverse locations nationwide with the limited IT resources of a charity. The support issues could be extremely labour intensive and time consuming with members of the IT team dispatched onsite to resolve problems or do upgrades.

“When you’re supporting so many users in some many different locations finding a new way to make the desktops easier to manage strongly appealed and led us to switch to a Wyse thin client infrastructure at the grass roots.”

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Ease ofmanagement

‘ Like any charity working with vulnerable people, information technology plays an important supporting role in how we work with individuals to rebuild their lives. But, we realised that the traditional set up of personal computers, a server and network connection was not the best way of delivering information services.’MARTYN CROFT CIO

THE SALVATION ARMY UKI

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Solution

Robust and easy to configure The team selected Wyse S10 thin clients as the new desktops because they are extremely robust, easy to configure and control centrally. This has transformed how the team looks after its desktop end users in the Lifehouses, as Martyn explains:

“On the rare times, when we needed to replace units, our local people simply had to swap out the old unit and plug in the new one we sent them. In fact our desktop support costs for the Lifehouses dropped down to the cost of a first class stamp and a Jiffy bag.”

The benefit of moving to the thin client infrastructure has come to the fore as Martyn’s team has worked on regular and special system upgrades.

Taking a thin client approach enabled the organisation to tailor IT to specific local requirements in the Lifehouses and social centres. Staff needed a basic desktop environment and this is delivered using Wyse S10 thin clients running Wyse Thin OS and Microsoft Terminal Services.

Inherent security and cost benefits Additionally it was important that the local desktops were secure with no need for any data to be stored onsite either at the desktop or in a local server. With no moving parts, the Wyse S10s also are robust and well suited to bustling environment within the Army’s Lifehouses.

How the Wyse thin clients allowed him to design in stronger data protection while delivering the right level of IT services and data access at the organisation’s grassroots is a strong driver for Martyn Croft: “I am passionate about the importance of information security for charities like ours that work in social welfare. Working with our clients, we are entrusted with sensitive data about very vulnerable people and their cases, as well as the personal details of our supporters and donors, making it critical to embed the strongest possible data protection into our IT infrastructure. That’s why Wyse thin clients and their inherent security are a vital component within our information security.”

The use of Wyse thin clients is now well established in the Army’s front line services with positive feedback from end users and the IT team. As a charitable organisation, the shift to virtual desktops is also meeting the requirement for rigorous value for money especially since the first units were installed more than five years ago.

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Longevity & highperformance

‘ We’re finding that the total cost of ownership is lower because of the thin clients’ longer longevity as a high performing client device that we don’t need to replace after a few years. With traditional desktop PCs, we’ve found they lasted around three or four years, while the Wyse thin clients keep on performing as expected and are demonstrating to us that claims of a ten year working lifespan are very credible.’

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Benefits

Multi media experience Having established this basic approach at its grassroots, The Salvation Army is now exploring how it can evolve its thin client infrastructure and expand desktop virtualisation to more parts of the organisation. The impetus for this work is how the infrastructure can accommodate rich multi-media.

“For both our social welfare work and ministry, we are finding that audio and video streaming are a requirement at the desktop for e-learning or how our officers now preach in our church halls using Powerpoint. While it’s ideal for the core work done with our clients in the field, we recognised that the current infrastructure isn’t designed for delivering multi-media content and applications.”

This has led The Salvation Army to choose Citrix HDX as the desktop virtualisation environment for the next stage in its moving the rest of the organisation away from traditional desktop computing. Citrix HDX meets the Army’s new requirements for a virtual desktop infrastructure that delivers a superior multi-media experience especially for audio and video.

Key to this decision is the availability of the Wyse Xenith zero clients for HDX that will enable the Salvation Army to maximise their investment in Citrix HDX for the long term.

The Salvation Army will also benefit from how zero clients further simplify the desktop client management. Unlike the thin clients, the zero clients have no local OS to boot, patch or manage, and as such are even easier to manage and need no endpoint protection from viruses or malware.

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Maximization of investment

‘ The doors really opened when we saw how the combination of Wyse Xenith zero clients and Citrix XenDesktop maximised the benefits of HDX technology. In answering our requirements for a superior multi-media experience, we will be able to extend the benefits of desktop virtualisation to a much wider community of end users who previously would only have accepted a high performance PC on their desk.’

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The next steps

Keeping pace with changeThe new Wyse Xenith virtual desktop environment will operate alongside the current thin client infrastructure. As one of the pilot projects for the Wyse Xeniths, the Army is replacing the PCs used by the students and teaching staff at The Salvation Army’s own theological college, the William Booth College. The support for dual screens, in addition to the speed and support for working with the latest multi-media applications, makes the Xeniths an ideal desktop for teaching and learning in the college.

The new virtual desktops at the college will go live in summer 2011. As Martyn explains this will be a significant step in the how the virtual technology is adopted in the future: “When fully implemented, the new Wyse virtual desktops will be an integral feature of the college’s newly refurbished facilities and therefore how we educate the next generation of Salvation Army officers.”

The Salvation Army is adept at keeping pace with changes in society with new approaches to how it supports local communities with social services and ministry. A similar innovation is seeing the organisation steadily move away from traditional computing to a Wyse-based virtual desktop infrastructure that is more flexible, secure and efficient.

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Flexibilityis key

‘ When fully implemented, the new Wyse virtual desktops will be an integral feature of the college’s newly refurbished facilities and therefore how we educate the next generation of Salvation Army officers.’MARTYN CROFT CIO

THE SALVATION ARMY UKI

Specification

Solution ArchitectureClients: Wyse Xenith, Xenith Pro & Wyse S10

Servers: HP DL380 servers with HP EVA storage

Storage: HP ProLiant DL185 G5 Storage Server with 1TB capacity

Virtualization: Citrix Xendesktop 5.5, Citrix XenApp 5, & VMware VSphere 4

Operating SystemWyse ThinOS

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© 2011 The Wyse logo and Wyse are trademarks of Wyse Technology Inc. Other product names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications subject to change without notice. Some features require support by server operating system and protocol. Approved Final 19 Oct 2011.

About Wyse TechnologyWyse Technology is the global leader in Cloud Client Computing. The Wyse portfolio includes industry-leading thin, zero and cloud PC client solutions with advanced management, desktop virtualization and cloud software supporting desktops, laptops and next generation mobile devices. Cloud client computing replaces the outdated computing model of the unsecure, unreliable, energy-intensive and expensive PC, all while delivering lower TCO and a superior user experience. Wyse has shipped more than 20 million units and has over 200 million people interacting with their products each day, enabling the leading private, public, hybrid and government cloud implementations worldwide. Wyse partners with industry-leading IT vendors, including Cisco®, Citrix®, IBM®, Microsoft, and VMware® as well as globally-recognized distribution and service partners. Wyse is headquartered in San Jose, California, U.S.A., with offices worldwide. More information can be found at www.wyse.com or by calling 1-800-GET-WYSE.

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