IIT Delhi opts for Citrix MetaFrame

The squeeze in IT budgets has not only affected private companies but also government and educational institutions. IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department used technology to resolve this issue. The department’s decision to deploy Citrix MetaFrame resulted in a substantial RoI and maximum utilisation of the existing IT infrastructure. Gaurav Patra reports

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi is one of the seven IITs created as centres of excellence for higher training, research and development in science, engineering and technology in India.

The computing infrastructure at IIT Delhi’s department of electrical engineering (DEE) is primarily based on Linux servers.

The present infrastructure of this department consists of a switched optical fibre network, which is uplinked to the Internet and other services. This centralised computing facility also consists of high performance computing servers, file servers, application servers and a networked cluster of workstations, PC servers, terminal servers, client PCs and dumb terminals.

Need for Citrix MetaFrame

As the number of students increased, lack of maintenance staff forced the department to adopt centralised services, which could be managed by a lesser number of people. Moreover, desktops suffer from typical software and hardware upgradation cycles, which were an expensive proposition for a low-budget academic department like this one.

As in the case of most educational institutions, one major constraint for this department of IIT, Delhi was a low IT budget. "We have a very small budget for our yearly IT needs. So, we need software that would cost little to acquire, maintain and upgrade. That’s the reason we are primarily on Linux," says Subrat Kar, associate professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT, New Delhi. But because a lot of people use Windows, and are accustomed to Windows or Windows-based desktops, IIT Delhi decided to have both Windows and Linux in place. "Windows’ roll-out cost seemed quite prohibitive for us. Upgrading 200-300 PCs every year to the next version of Windows was not a viable option," he adds. That is why IIT Delhi also decided to consolidate Windows to a central server. Apart from this, the institute also realised that in case of emergencies at the campus, the institute’s legacy PCs (286/DOS, 386) could not be used with Windows.

These were the reasons that forced the DEE to think of Citrix MetaFrame.

Though it had also considered going in for Tarantella, since at that point of time there were not many thin clients supporting Tarantella clients, the department opted for Citrix. "In the case of Citrix, everything goes on the server, nothing goes on to the thin client. It is only the display that is coming to the thin client. So, bandwidth between the two is minimal," he adds. Apart from this, the other consideration was ease of deployment and similarity to the existing user interfaces that were Windows-based.

The ability of Citrix to push new applications to the user desktop without having extra software, was another factor in the deployment of Citrix MetaFrame. "The faculty needs Windows-based applications and Windows to access the Computer Services Centre and students need both Windows and Unix. Citrix has the capability to run both. That is why Citrix was the obvious choice for us," says Kar.

"We decided to have everything on the Citrix set-up and increase the capacity of the servers every year. But the periphery, where the users are actually working on these servers will remain constant. So, we decided to have thin clients on the periphery," informs Kar. He further adds that DEE does not plan to upgrade the thin client or make any infrastructural investments on thin clients. Today, the department is using Citrix MetaFrame 1.8. It runs applications like Internet Explorer, X Windows, StarOffice, and Forte through Citrix MetaFrame. The Citrix implementation, which was completed in March 2002, required a total investment of around Rs 12 lakh (with academic discounts).

As far as the Citrix deployment is concerned, two machines running Windows 2000 Server are configured as a load-balance Citrix server farm, (which will be augmented to four this year), VXL and HCL thin clients are also in place. Today, the department has around 160 Citrix licenses, of which using only around 70 licenses are being used. "Keeping in mind future requirements we have opted for 160 licenses," informs Kar.

Benefits

The Citrix implementation has enabled centralised management of file, anti-virus (on server) and printing resources. It has also helped the department use legacy PCs in times of emergencies. Apart from this, the hardware has an almost zero maintenance cost, power consumption has come down and it also allows smart card-based access, which will be introduced very soon.

As far as RoI is concerned, the department has already started reaping benefits. "We have been able to avoid upgradation of any PC last year. Typically, we upgrade between 50 to 60 PCs a year in various ways. This translates into a cost saving of over Rs 10 lakh and thus we have already recovered a substantial part of the cost of the Citrix licenses. This is the biggest benefit from the Citrix implementation as now we
do not have to spend any thing on Windows upgradation," informs Kar. He further adds that while deploying 200 Microsoft Office licenses would have cost over Rs 4 lakh, by using StarOffice and Citrix the department has made StarOffice available to every desk at no additional cost. And Kar thinks this is a huge benefit for his department.

The thin clients that the institute purchased from VXL and HCL also allows DEE to deploy Netscape, X Windows, character terminal emulation modes, RDP and ICA clients from ROM. "This actually allows us to avoid running memory intensive Netscape sessions on the main servers. Plus, local X Windows servers further ease the load on the X servers and RDP also allows us to use Microsoft Terminal Services," he adds.

ICA client-based access has been particularly useful for allowing faculty RAS-based access from homes. Previously, though IIT allowed free RAS access to every faculty residence, downloads were limited by the speed of the modem connection to the home. Now, by starting a Citrix session on the main server, downloads can be done at the full 4 Mbps bandwidth available on the IIT Delhi link to Ernet/VSNL. The Citrix session only requires 14 Kbps modem connections for screen updates.

In the days to come, Kar plans to augment the Citrix server farm with more servers and replace more PCs with stand-alone thin clients.

In the future, he is also planning to replace stand-alone Linux servers with Linux clusters.