Kent County Council’s Desktop and Application Infrastructure goes virtual with the help of KEMP load balancers

Kent County Council (KCC) is virtualising its application infrastructure and using KEMP load balancers to ensure high availability, scalability and performance. The move from a traditional desktop and application infrastructure to a virtual Windows application infrastructure for some 6,500 users is central to the Council’s drive for greater efficiency and flexibility of its data services and to meet the growing demand for more applications, while reducing costs and office space.

The IT department at Kent County Council (KCC) supports staff in 200 different business units across some 300 facilities, from County Hall in Maidstone to schools, colleges, offices and NHS partnership sites.

The IT team at KCC chose VMWare Horizon™ View and Workspace to build its virtual, unified environment for delivering over 300 different applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, MS Exchange 2010, as well as customised highway management software and case management systems. As the team architected the overall project, it was clear that load balancing was going to be an important part of the application delivery infrastructure.

Working with its IT solutions partner Phoenix Software, the Council looked at the options and selected KEMP Technologies to fill the need for application delivery in its infrastructure. “KEMP offered an intuitive, cost-effective solution that provided all the functionality and scalability we needed and most importantly, delivered this natively on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), which was the platform we chose to host the virtualised infrastructure,” said Glen Larkin, Lead Technical Architect at KCC.

KCC has two active/active datacentres; one in Maidstone and the other in a shared facility with neighbouring Medway Council. Each datacentre has two Cisco UCS chassis with dual high availability KEMP GEO Multi-Site load balancers. The KEMP LoadMaster Operating System Software (LMOS) for UCS is fully Cisco IVT (Interoperability Validation Testing) Certified and is the only Application Delivery Control (ADC) operating system optimised for bare metal installation within the UCS fabric without requiring a hypervisor. This allows for the highest performance possible and reduces the amount of application traffic that has to traverse the higher latency network external to the UCS fabric.

”Layer 7 workload optimisation with LoadMaster for Cisco UCS increases application performance and provides ultra-low-latency app delivery through tight integration with the underlying platform,” said Jason Dover, Director, Technical Product Marketing, KEMP Technologies. “Further, it allows Kent County Council to leverage its investment in Cisco infrastructure by converting a UCS blade into a dedicated ADC with KEMP’s LoadMaster operating system, eliminating the need for external hardware load balancers.”

LoadMaster for UCS offers Layer 4-7 server load balancing, SSL offload and acceleration, data caching and compression along with a Layer 7 intrusion prevention and security features including pre-authentication, single sign-on and persistent logging.

Glen Larkin and his team have currently rolled out the new virtual environment to some 150 users and the complete migration is due to be completed by April next year. “The deployment has been going very smoothly with the support of KEMP and Phoenix Software,” said Glen Larkin. “Our new virtual, well-balanced environment will provide a flexible and scalable platform for the Council’s future needs and means that we no longer have to support thousands of desktop PCs, which allows us to use our time and resources to greater effect.”