Pro Staff’s WinFrame Solution

A company that has to vie for customers and employees cannot afford to let alack of technology slow it down. Representatives at Pro Staff, a contingencystaffing services company, agreed that to maintain a leadership position, thecompany needed to quickly automate its manual staffing processes with a minimumof capital outlay and a small support staff.

Pro Staff started as a small, regional operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota,14 years ago and now has more than 100 offices in most major US markets. Thecompany employed more than 60,000 people last year. With a relatively smalladministrative staff and only pockets of technology throughout the organization,Pro Staff needed a technical solution to remain competitive and support itsgrowth.

Pro Staff implemented a Citrix WinFrame enterprise strategy usingIntelligent Console Architecture (ICA)-based distributed Windows computing withcentralized servers and Wyse remote terminals. ICA is a Citrix-developedprotocol that increases transmission speeds for remote-node software (for adetailed review of ICA, see John Enck, "Think Thin and Win with IntelligentConsole Architecture," page 128). This approach lets an enterprisecentralize software administration, which helps reduce the introduction ofunauthorized software and viruses, pool limited Help Desk resources, and savemoney by incorporating terminals instead of PCs.

SOLUTION SUMMARY

A Look Back
More than two years ago, Pro Staff decided to investin a computerized system to help its staffing professionals manage a rapidlygrowing base of applicants and employees. Pro Staff first experimented with thelimited installation of a DOS-based staffing application that relied on Citrix'sWinView to distribute the application across a WAN. Although the staffingapplication proved difficult to use and inefficient across a WAN, Pro Staff wasintrigued by the Citrix concept and the early whispers of WinFrame, multi-userserver software based on Windows NT Server (for a review of WinFrame, TimDaniels, "Citrix WinFrame 1.6 Beta," May 1996).

Pro Staff continued searching for a staffing application and found aWindows-based database application that tracks job applicants and their skills,work assignments, and clients. This product was one of the first to useWinFrame. With Citrix, this product became Pro Staff's solution. The MicrosoftOffice suite was Pro Staff's standard, and the Windows-based staffing productwas waiting in the wings when the company began looking at an NT-based solution.

As a former Value Added Reseller (VAR) for Citrix, Kevin Smith, Pro Staff'sIS director, was familiar with WinView. He recognized that WinFrame improved onWinView by offering multiprocessor support, load balancing, the 20% to 30%faster ICA protocol, and seamless integration with most Microsoft products andfeatures--including NT's solid, secure platform. With assistance from a Citrixsoftware VAR, Pro Staff's network systems engineer/administrator, KevinWoodward, took the lead as the engineer on the project. More than five years ofNovell NetWare and Windows 3.x experience and a detailed knowledge of thestaffing industry made him uniquely qualified to manage the project.

Building an Enterprise
Pro Staff assumed each site needed a PC;with no legacy systems to use, Pro Staff made PC purchasing a significant partof the project budget. Then, Wyse Technology announced Winterm, a smart terminal(486/50MHz processor with 512KB of cache RAM) built to run the ICA-basedWinFrame client with WinFrame servers. Each Winterm costs around $800, and thislow price tag helped Pro Staff executives decide to deploy one workstation foreach of the approximately 700 users in placement offices across the country. Bychoosing the Winterm terminals, Pro Staff reduced the cost of adding newworkstations by more than half. Pro Staff will still make one PC available ateach site for floppy disk transfers and resume scanning.

The company attached the Winterm terminals to a carrier-managed frame relayWAN running TCP/IP with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to handlemost addressing chores (for information on DHCP, see John Enck, "Take aNumber," October 1995, Mark Minasi, "Improving on DHCP,"September 1996, and Spyros Sakellariadis, "Integrating and AdministeringDNS," September 1996). Figure 1 shows Pro Staff's network configuration.This combination creates an elegant technical infrastructure that offers thelogistical advantages and cost savings of centralized processing and has thescaleability and flexibility of a distributed system.

The Citrix ICA protocol sends only keystrokes and screen updates across thewire, and all application execution happens on the server. This configurationrequires some pretty beefy server hardware. Pro Staff went with Digital'sPrioris line.

Each WinFrame server contains four Pentium 133MHz processors with 512MB ofRAM to load balance shared resources for 40 users. (Citrix suggests oneprocessor and 128MB of RAM for every 10 users.) Users will run remote sessionson the WinFrame boxes, and the applications and associated data will reside ontwo clustered NT servers (for an explanation of clustering, see Mark Smith, "ClosingIn on Clusters," August 1996) using Digital Clusters for Windows NT (for areview of this technology, see Joel Sloss, "Digital Clusters for WindowsNT," August 1996) connected to two external RAIDs housed in DigitalEquipment's Storageworks cabinet. Each clustered server manages its own 8GBRAID, one for the staffing application and one for the productivityapplications.

Pro Staff will duplicate this configuration at another site to createredundancy in case of a disaster. Half of Pro Staff's users will access thestaffing application and data residing at one data center and the remainingusers will access the other. Each data center can accommodate all users ifnecessary. Pro Staff has built each WinFrame server as a Backup DomainController (BDC) that receives conditioned power from an Exide UPS hard-wired toits own 60-amp circuit. Down to the switches and hubs, Pro Staff'sinfrastructure is built to deal with virtually any failure.

Realizing the Benefits
Winterm terminals offer significant costsavings over PCs and make hardware configuration a breeze. For example, toconfigure IP addresses with DHCP, you enter the address of your DHCP server andthe default gateway. Period. Then you can log on to your NT desktop with onemouse click. With WinFrame's Administrative Tools, your Systems Administratorcontrols what users can see and modify on their desktop and what applicationsthey can access from their desktop.

Software management across the enterprise becomes as easy as on a localLAN. You can install, update, modify, and delete files throughout thenetwork--all from your server. Because users can't load software from theirdesktop, you eliminate unauthorized screen savers, games, or otherresource-hogging recreational software. You also dramatically reduceopportunities for users to introduce viruses into your environment.

WinFrame is also a tool for the corporate Help Desk. The shadow featurelets Help Desk personnel assume control of a user's desktop. The users can watchtheir screen while Help Desk personnel talk them through a solution.

Please see "An Interview with Pro Staff"