BHP-Billiton-operated Samancor Chrome, the world`s second largest integrated ferrochrome producer and one of SA`s leading exporters of chrome alloy products, is soon to see total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits from a Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite implementation at its Middelburg, Witbank, Tubatse and Western Chrome mines.
Enterprise Connection, a Citrix Systems Gold partner, implemented Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server, Feature Release 3, at Samancor Chrome in May 2002. MetaFrame XP provides 280 of Samancor Chrome`s 1 100 users with immediate access to its enterprise applications.
Sollie Swanepoel, Samancor Chrome IT manager, commented: "At the beginning of 2002, we took a strategic decision to move away from our legacy mainframe environment onto an integrated SAP environment, requiring us to replace over 250 of the existing PC-bases. Considering the cost of this purchase as well as that some of our business units were continually replacing over 60% of their PCs, we wanted to find a solution that would help us reduce costs and extend the life of our desktops.
"Through the Citrix thin client infrastructure solution we were able to extend the life of our desktops by 18 months, and were able to save about R2 million at the outset that would have been spent on purchasing new PCs."
Samancor Chrome was able to reuse most of its existing Pentium 1 and 2 PCs on the desktop, and now only purchases thin client devices when it needs to add a new desktop device.
"Of course business benefits aren`t only short-term. Within the next two years we will fully realise the actual impact of cutting down on the cost of replacing further desktops from the budget, as well as benefits from increased productivity of our staff," he said.
"MetaFrame gave us the ability to centrally deploy and manage applications across our several locations, and to roll-out thin client devices, important benefits in our rugged mining operations environment. The ease of installation and support of new desktops without increasing your IT staff complement are major benefits of this solution, especially in a centralised SAP environment.
"As MetaFrame centralises access to applications and information, this enables our IT staff to deliver and manage applications, and provide support on demand."
According to Swanepoel, Samancor Chrome has now simplified the complexity and reduced the costs of deploying and administering its applications together with optimising service delivery to end-users.
Samancor Chrome delivers the following applications through Citrix: SAP, Microsoft Office Suite, as well as its payroll, production, manufacturing execution and other in-house applications.
Swanepoel commented: "When we roll-out any new Windows applications, we will be at an advantage and due to Citrix, will be able to fast-track to the new operating environment quickly."
Samancor Chrome`s IT server infrastructure consists of eight Compaq DL380 servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, with a mix of Windows 2000 and Windows NT as part of the standard operating environment on the desktop.
Each of the business units has a LAN environment with two servers running Citrix Metaframe. The SAP applications are located on a centralised SAP instance in Johannesburg and access is gained via a WAN to the production environment.
Should bandwidth ever become a problem for Samancor Chrome, says Swanepoel, the company is geared up to add Citrix servers to the Chrome farm within the Johannesburg office. This will enable the company to run Citrix sessions over its WAN instead of the current raw TCP/IP sessions between the local Citrix servers and the SAP servers.
Swanepoel concluded: "The project implementation from Enterprise Connection was well managed and delivery was excellent. We had no problems technically and in fact learnt a lot from them."
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