The nature of the work of any journalistic organization is such that the functions of most of its employees may well be carried out outside the office. To do this, it is necessary to provide them with full-fledged remote work opportunities. At the end of 2011, the company's top management decided to modernize the IT infrastructure of the entire holding. In the editorial office of the newspaper "Economics and Life", the first object of modernization, systems providing business process automation and joint work with documents were already functioning, but it was necessary to transfer all the functionalities to the virtual environment. At the design stage, DEPO specialists proposed a complex solution for remote workplaces and internal communications that best met the publishing house business needs.
Prior to implementing desktop virtualization, the client's IT service standardized and unified the editorial office business processes. The publishing system ATEX Prestige was implemented, as well as Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a system of collaborative work on documents, in the space of which all materials of the publication are handled at all stages of work on them by journalists, editors, proofreaders and other employees.
The next step of modernization was hardware optimization and implementation of virtualization tools. Beforehand, it was necessary to make sure that the Prestige system was able to work effectively in a virtual environment, and to work out scenarios for the interaction of all IT infrastructure components. We made it possible thanks to the DEPO Computers risk-free design concept. It allows you to offer the customer exactly the solution and functionality he needs. Moreover, it makes it possible to take a final decision on the choice only after the customer is convinced that everything works properly.
IT infrastructure modernization was implemented in three directions: virtualization of workstations, consolidation of graphic stations and corporate IP-telephony.
To virtualize workstations of Economic Newspaper publishing house employees, DEPO VDI Small Business Suite out-of-the-box solution, specifically developed by DEPO Computers in cooperation with Citrix Systems for medium and small business companies, was used.
The hardware of the solution is represented by a high-performance server DEPO Storm 3300V2, designed to work with the most demanding to resources and business-critical applications: DBMS, applications for Internet and Intranet infrastructure support, and e-business applications. The 2 U high server is characterized by high reliability due to duplication and redundancy of all-important components and is designed for installation in a 19″ rack.
The software part of DEPO VDI Small Business Suite solution is Citrix VDI-in-a-Box. It is a simple and affordable VDI solution with broad customization options. VDI-in-a-Box allows users to fully customize the device thanks to vDisk (virtual disk) technology, which provides full security of user and application data, while IT professionals can easily manage systems using a single copy of the master image, saving time and money.
The graphics stations were consolidated on a DEPO Race BladeEN710 chassis with DEPO Race BladeG10 blade servers.
The 7U-high chassis is designed for installation in a standard 19″ rack and allows the installation of up to 10 dual-processor professional graphics blade stations with hot-swappable support. In its basic configuration the chassis has two 1.4 kW power supply (with the ability to install up to four 2 kW of power supply with redundancy in the scheme N+1 and support for hot-swap). The chassis is also equipped with a control module with KVM and IPMI 2.0 functions.
DEPO Race BladeG10 graphics blade servers are based on the modern Intel platform with support for up to two Intel® Xeon® 5600 series processors and up to 96 GB of DDRIII 1333/1066/800 ECC Registered RAM. Supports NVIDIA Quadro series professional 3D graphics adapters.
Each server includes a module for organizing remote access via PCoIP for comfortable remote work in any application, "blade" client terminal with 4 USB 2.0 ports and 2 DVI-I video outputs; integrated IPMI 2.0 module and possibility of connecting via KVM. Two Gigabit network adapters allow to combine "blades" into local LAN.
The third area of the project was the introduction of IP-telephony for internal communications of employees. As a result, any employee can communicate with a colleague via intercom, no matter where he is and from which PC he logged in to the system. In addition, the company was able to significantly reduce the budget for long-distance and international telephone calls.
Many employees of the publishing house note noticeable benefits from the implementation, in particular, they no longer have to come to the office on a daily basis. A significant portion of system accesses already occurs from mobile devices, which further accelerates business processes but does not reduce the level of corporate data security.
The IT service of the publishing house has obtained an easily scalable and flexible IT infrastructure, into which it is easy to implement new automation tools in the future. Now you can prepare a new employee's workplace in just an hour.
The management was able to rent the vacated workspace to other organizations, earning an additional source of income. All this increased the image of the publishing house Economic Newspaper also as a potential employer. The solution fully paid for itself in just 5 months after the start of operation of the project and began to bring in real revenue. Such results allow further development of the IT infrastructure without affecting the current business processes.
