Diaxion helps a leading food products company migrate to a new Citrix environment
Overview
One of Australia’s largest food products companies, with an operating model that fosters autonomy in its business units, was challenged with high support overhead and security risks from an ageing Citrix environment. Working with Diaxion to design, build and migrate to a new, secure and stable environment, the company was able to reduce IT management overhead and risk.
The Challenge
Our client is one of the largest consumer products companies in Australia. It makes some of the country’s favourite and most innovative food products with a diverse range of leading brands. With a vision to provide the best home for a growing family of safe, well led businesses, the organisation ensures that each brand has the autonomy to develop their own identity and culture.
To fulfil the promise of an operating model that encourages entrepreneurial spirit, ownership and autonomy, the company needed to improve productivity and work agility. This meant addressing an ageing Citrix environment and operating system that was nearing end-of-life vendor support and needed replacing.
Diaxion had a thorough understanding of the company’s Citrix environment, having managed a number of projects in recent years, including a review of the environment with recommendations for improvement. Some of these were adopted by the client and Diaxion was subsequently asked to help implement a holistic plan to address the limitations of the Citrix environment. This would mean creating a secure, stable and supportable Citrix platform, and migrating compatible applications to the new environment. By simplifying the application environment, complexity and support overhead could be reduced.
The Solution
In collaboration with our client, project phases of Pre-Migration, and Migration and Handover were defined. Rather than a big bang cutover, the approach was to provision the new Citrix FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) infrastructure and deliver published applications incrementally over the migration period. To support the phased migration, old Citrix ICA and new Citrix FMA were setup side by side by integrating Storefront, NetScaler, Citrix receiver and supporting RDS licensing services. The FMA environment was commissioned and integrated to the existing environment, before compatible applications were migrated to delivery groups. An assessment was conducted of all components and the compatibility with the new environment.
Business application owners were notified of the project scope and the estimated timelines for the go-live date. Migration was scheduled by business load for each location, and applications that would not run on the new environment were identified within the first two months of the project. With a critical supply chain application involved, Diaxion was required to do advanced planning and schedule after-hours migration windows with roll back plans.
As-built documentation was given to the client to maintain the production environment and highlight disaster recovery considerations for the new Citrix environment.
The Outcome
By creating and migrating to a new Citrix environment, our client was able to decommission old infrastructure, redundant applications and end of life operating systems. This reduced the IT management overhead and the risk profile for the organisation. The number of calls to the service desk concerning the applications and Citrix reduced significantly.
During the COVID-19 lockdown the new environment was able to scale up quickly to enable the rapid implementation of a work from home business continuity initiative. The number of users increased ten-fold from the remote working program.
Diaxion was able to deliver the migration without any unscheduled outages or business interruption to any of our client’s warehouses or factories.
