Music publisher speeds networked application response

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The specialist classical music publisher Boosey & Hawkes went live at the beginning of this year with wide area network (WAN) optimisation technology to accelerate application delivery to 75 remote workers in its two overseas branch offices.

Boosey selected WAN optimisation tool Citrix WANScaler, which is being implemented by third party consultants Frontier Technology, to speed up network traffic so that users from New York and Berlin get the same experience of the company's core applications as at the London headquarters. The increased productivity enabled by the technology is also expected to help reduce the company's operational IT costs.

Paul Vernon, Boosey & Hawkes IT manager told IT PRO that the publisher had been using a Citrix Presentation Server-based infrastructure to cost effectively centralise the delivery of applications to remote offices for at least three years already and started using the WANScaler product in a proof-of-concept project from last November.

Increasing issues with network latency and fluctuating bandwidth levels between offices were causing dips in performance during Presentation Server sessions. "The Citrix servers run on the same network connection as the internet and so, as internet use became more popular, our key aim was to prevent the loss of user productivity as a result of poor application performance," said Vernon.

Citrix WANScaler technology was selected to replace Boosey's existing WAN acceleration equipment to mitigate the effects of link latency. It also integrates with the Presentation Server, enabling granular optimisation of the Citrix ICA packet transfer protocol and providing compression and acceleration capabilities to prioritise and increase the throughput of file transfer traffic.

Vernon said: "The introduction of WANScaler has all but eliminated our previous performance issues between offices. It enables users in remote offices to use applications based in London at near LAN-like speeds."

He added that user productivity has already risen and support desk calls have fallen, allowing his IT team to focus on new projects. "The WANScaler also offers us an additional business benefit, where we don't have to upgrade our two MB-per-second lines as soon as we would have had to otherwise," he said.

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