Lion Nathan

Beverage Distributor Streamlines Computing With Terminal Services Technology

Lion Nathan produces some of the best-known beverages in Australia and New Zealand, such as Tooheys, XXXX, Hahn, James Squire, Heineken, and Bacardi. The company’s remote locations include large breweries and small distribution sites. To improve data flows and enhance the performance of software applications that employees access remotely, the company worked with Microsoft Services and HP Consulting and Integration to deploy Windows Server® 2008, with a focus on the Terminal Services feature of the operating system. Lion Nathan expects to improve application performance for remote users with the new and enhanced features of Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008. The company also anticipates that it can cut costs and implement a more flexible computing environment with more telecommuting options.

Situation

Windows Server 2008 provides a more centralized and streamlined way of managing remote clients and the applications that they access over the network.  Brett Watkins Systems Manager Lion Nathan

Lion Nathan is an alcoholic beverages company that operates in Australia and New Zealand. The company brews popular beer brands such as James Squire, Tooheys, XXXX, Hahn, West End, and Emu, and it is a distributor for products including Beck’s and Heineken beer, Bacardi rum, Smirnoff vodka, and Gordon’s gin. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Lion Nathan has been in operation since the mid-19th century. Today, it employs about 1,800 people in Australia and 1,400 people in New Zealand.

For Lion Nathan, the flow of information across the company is as important as the flow of the beverages that it makes and distributes. The company’s operations are spread out among many locations and rely on the smooth exchange of data such as sales reports, inventory levels, delivery times, and customer information. Lion Nathan operates 10 major remote sites—breweries that have at least 40 employees—along with many smaller brewing sites and distribution points in both Australia and New Zealand.

Additionally, the company has administrative offices in several Australian cities, including Perth, Adelaide, Victoria, and Brisbane, and it maintains a data center along with its headquarters in Sydney. Of its total employee base, about 2,500 people in the two countries have access to the corporate network.

The Lion Nathan IT architecture is based primarily on Microsoft® products, including the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition and Windows® XP operating systems. The company is gradually upgrading to the Windows Vista® operating system as it purchases new workstations and portable computers.

Lion Nathan also uses Citrix technology for some terminal services so that employees can access information and specific applications, such as spreadsheets used for financials, marketing documents, and a product-demand planning application. The company has a mixture of differently configured workstations in its Citrix environment. These include “fat clients,” which are fully configured workstations that have network access, and “thin clients,” which are minimally configured devices that access the company network from low-bandwidth remote sites. The thin clients often have few, if any, software applications actually installed on the local hardware.

Employees use their workstations to access data from other locations and to use software programs through a network connection, including Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software, Microsoft Office Word 2003, and the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client.

The Lion Nathan IT department wanted to improve access to applications and data for remote employees. It sought to provide a consistent user interface for company software regardless of an employee’s location or the type of application that the employee was using. The department also wanted to boost performance for users who had to access business software over the network instead of on a local device; depending on the quality and speed of the connection, opening an application and performing common tasks remotely could be sluggish at best.

In addition, the IT staff wanted to reduce some of the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining a terminal services infrastructure, to more efficiently accommodate the company's growth in both number of locations and number of employees.  

Solution

Users say that the performance is so good during Terminal Services sessions that they are not really aware that they are doing their computing tasks over a network.  Mick Faber Technical Analyst Lion Nathan

Lion Nathan became an early adopter of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. Working with Microsoft Services and HP Consulting and Integration, the company began deploying the software in late 2007 to take advantage of new and enhanced Terminal Services features. The initial deployment targeted a pilot group of about 12 users. HP provided on-site support during the design and deployment of the technology, and is working with Lion Nathan to gradually add more users as the company upgrades its workstations and portable computers.

Lion Nathan is using several key Terminal Services features and functions that are available in Windows Server 2008. These include:

• Terminal Services RemoteApp™, which makes it possible for Lion Nathan users to run software programs through Terminal Services while experiencing performance that is nearly identical to having the software installed on the local computer. Users can run programs through Terminal Services RemoteApp side by side with their local programs if they are accessing the network from “fat client” devices.
• Terminal Services Gateway, which lets authorized remote users connect to terminal server computers and to remote workstations on the Lion Nathan corporate network from any Internet-connected device that is running Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) 6.0 or higher. RDC is a Terminal Services feature that provides remote Lion Nathan users with access to applications, files, and network resources. Only the users' keyboard input, mouse input, and display output data—not actual application information—are transmitted over the network, thereby saving on bandwidth and improving performance. Terminal Services Gateway provides an encrypted connection between remote users on the Internet and the computers that are running the productivity applications. Lion Nathan anticipates using this feature for employees who wish to telecommute.
• Terminal Services Web Access, a feature that makes Terminal Services RemoteApp programs available to users from within a Web browser. With Terminal Services Web Access, Lion Nathan employees can use any computer that has an Internet connection and Web browser to log on and access a variety of software applications. This is useful, for example, for traveling employees who want to perform a few tasks quickly from an Internet cafe or airport kiosk.
• Terminal Services Session Broker, which distributes new user sessions to the Lion Nathan server computers that have the most capacity at the moment. This feature can be used as an alternative to Network Load Balancing for Terminal Services. It helps to optimize the user experience by boosting performance through higher availability of applications and information.
• Terminal Services Easy Print, a new feature that makes it possible for Lion Nathan employees to print documents such as reports and invoices from a Terminal Services RemoteApp program or full desktop session to a local or network printer installed on the client computer. With Terminal Services Easy Print, printers are supported without the need to install print drivers on the terminal server. 

Lion Nathan is also using Terminal Services Licensing, a license management service through which the company can obtain and manage client access licenses for devices and users that are connecting to a terminal server. The licensing service simplifies the task of license management for Lion Nathan system administrators while minimizing the possibility that the company will either purchase too many or too few licenses.

Lion Nathan is deploying Windows Server 2008 on HP ProLiant DL385 G2 server hardware equipped with two 2.6 gigahertz Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors and 16 gigabytes of RAM. The workstations include HP 8510p portable computers and HP dc7800 SFF workstations.

Benefits

By deploying Windows Server 2008, IT administrators at Lion Nathan expect to enhance the computing performance that users experience when remotely accessing applications. The company anticipates cost savings and improved scalability for remote terminals. Lion Nathan also expects that Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services will help it provide a more flexible working environment by expanding telecommuting options.

Windows Server 2008 provides … our company with a way to protect our network from viruses and other threats when employees access the network from a home PC.  Brett Watkins Systems Manager Lion Nathan

Enhanced Computing Performance

Mick Faber, Technical Analyst for the IT department at Lion Nathan, says Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services will help to increase computing performance for users in remote offices who are accessing applications over the network.

“Windows Server 2008 helps in the prioritization of workloads going to and from terminals in remote locations,” says Faber. “Before Windows Server 2008, users would commonly experience degradation in the performance of programs like Office Outlook, Excel, and Word. Users would see sluggish performance in opening applications and doing basic things like editing a document.

“Now, with Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008, the application execution takes place on the server. So the only information being sent over the network is keyboard, mouse, and display information. In our initial deployment, users say that the performance is so good during Terminal Services sessions that they are not really aware that they are doing their computing tasks over a network.”

Reduced Costs, Greater Scalability

Brett Watkins, Systems Manager for the Lion Nathan IT department, says he anticipates that Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services will help the company save money on its remote computing requirements, while making it easier to add and manage remote computing solutions for the company’s many branch offices. “We expect that if we can move more of our remote computing operations onto Windows Server 2008, there will be cost savings,” says Watkins.

“Licensing and support costs will be reduced because Windows Server 2008 provides a more centralized and streamlined way of managing remote clients and the applications that they access over the network,” Watkins says. “For example, we expect to see more efficient and cost-effective deployment of Microsoft Office 2007 as it is rolled out to employees in the coming year. This will also help us to streamline the process of adding more terminals at remote offices when needed.”

More Flexible Working Environment

Lion Nathan expects that Windows Server 2008 will make telecommuting easier for employees. “Like many other companies, we are evaluating the advantages of allowing our employees to telecommute,” says Watkins. “Employees can save on commuting by doing at least some of their work from home, and some employees like to get work done late at night.

“By using Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008, we can provide a thin-client scenario for employees who are telecommuting,” he says. “Windows Server 2008 provides our employees with better performance when they are working with applications, and it provides our company with a way to protect our network from viruses and other threats when employees access the network from a home PC. Using Windows Server 2008 will help us to achieve a more flexible computing environment for remote workers, a safer system for our network, and a more fluid experience for end users.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about HP products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.hp.com.au/microsoftsolutions

For more information about Lion Nathan products and services, call (61) (02) 8232 3333 or visit the Web site at: 
http://www.lion-nathan.com/

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008, with built-in Web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, Web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools like IIS 7.0, Server Manager, and Windows PowerShell™, allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline Web, configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller option for Active Directory Domain Services harden the operating system and help protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business.

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2008