Manufacturing company achieves seamless digital  transformation

Partner overview

Briggs & Stratton, a leading manufacturing company, recently embarked on a transformative journey seeking a highly scalable and resilient application and infrastructure presence. To address performance and scalability challenges, they found their solution through a partnership with CDW.

Background

Prior to migrating to Azure, Briggs and Stratton ran their entire Citrix infrastructure in their on-premise datacenter. The environment included about 75 Citrix Virtual Desktops Infrastructure (VDI), Microsoft SQL servers, Windows Servers (Storefront and Controller), and NetScaler all utilizing Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for authentication and authorization.

Briggs made the decision to re-host/re-platform their Citrix infrastructure to Microsoft Azure to address the performance and scalability problems.

Challenge

With an aging on-premise infrastructure, Briggs experienced difficulties in scaling up/down virtual desktops to adjust performance. Briggs needed a cost-effective solution to scale out/in VDIs. To accomplish this in the on-premise datacenter, would have required new hardware, thus an increase in their budget. Briggs also faced numerous performance issues and logged incidents from end users and they needed to address these concerns.

Solution overview

CDW’s solution for Briggs uses these Azure Services: Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure Networking, Azure Express Route. Azure backup and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems.

Conclusion & impact

Briggs & Stratton’s workforce now enjoys seamless access to high-performing Citrix Virtual Desktops following their successful digital transformation. The agility of scaling up or down these virtual desktop instances is achieved within a remarkable 5-minute timeframe. The Citrix backend infrastructure, including SQL Servers, operates smoothly without encountering any issues. To ensure fast and secure connectivity between their on-premise environment and Azure, Briggs & Stratton has established a dedicated 50 Mbps ExpressRoute circuit. This setup allows for efficient data transfer and reliable network connectivity. As a result of these improvements, the incidence of Citrix VDI-related tickets has significantly reduced, with performance and network-related concerns no longer posing major challenges.

Infrastructure overview:

• 75 Citrix Virtual Desktops running Windows 10 Enterprise on Azure Standard B2ms Virtual Machines with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB memory, utilizing premium SSD storage.
• Microsoft SQL Server operating on Azure Standard E2s v3 Virtual Machines with 2 vCPUs and 16 GB memory, running Windows Server 2016 Datacenter and employing premium SSD storage.
• Two Citrix Controller and Storefront servers running Windows Server 2016 Datacenter on Azure Standard E2s v3 Virtual Machines, each with 2 vCPUs and 16 GB memory.
• A dedicated 50 Mbps ExpressRoute circuit facilitating secure and rapid connectivity between on-premise and Azure.