Application Delivery

Application/Server consolidation and automation has been the buzz word in the India IT community for long. Once the applications are consolidated to a single datacenter, the new IT teams are faced with a new challenge; how to securely deliver applications to branch office users and mobile users working on lower bandwidths?

Generally enterprises have managed VPN connectivity from service provides which enables them to seamlessly connect branch offices to main corporate network. Although the application server is reachable to all part of customer network, it really depends on the application if it can be accessed in such large low bandwidth MPLS based network. Typically the applications are designed for LAN based access running at speed of 10 Mbps or more. Some of the applications always assumes a fast network and hence fails to perform in lower bandwidth networks. Generally a customer may have higher bandwidth MPLS connectivity at the main datacenter but the branches are limited to less than 2Mbps connectivity. In such scenarios, high bandwidth applications like ERP clients and database clients fail to work.

Users need a way to delivery such business critical applications requiring high bandwidth throughout the path. The only solution to make these applications perform over slow networks is to convert a 2 tier application to 3 tier where an additional layer is added to provide presentation virtualization. In a 3 tier scenario, the data processing is done at the server side itself and only the processed information is delivered to the user.

Propalms TSE is a terminal services management solution that can convert any 2 tier application into 3 tiers and drastically reduces the bandwidth requirement to deliver the applications over slow networks.

Propalms TSE: How it works

Customer’s applications will be installed on the Propalms TSE server running on Windows server platform. Customer can choose to manage the application server on its own. The application server will integrate with customer’s AD infrastructure for access control. Once ready, customer can do role based assignment of application to their users. User can go to specified URL, login and launch the application from the browser. User can be using thin clients, their personal PC or just any other machine. The only pre-requisites is a browser.

Deploying such a delivery platform will require following components:

1. Windows 2003 Server

2. Windows terminal services CAL licenses based on no. of concurrent users

3. Propalms TSE server with license equal to concurrent users to be supported

4. Appropriately size hardware to be able to support the specified concurrent user load with the applications

5. The application clients with appropriate licenses

Advantages to Enterprises

1. Maximize the benefit from highly reliable connected network by able to run any type of application over MPLS network

2. Web-enable all your applications and reachable from any part of your network.

3. Zero down your application management by using server based computing model from Tulip. Your administrator will never need to go to any user machine for application installation or upgrade

4. Maximize security by keeping all application data on centralized servers

5. Reduce cost by having low security risk, easy data-backup from hosted application server and zero end user management

6. Slowly adopt thin client computing reducing your over all PC hardware cost to zero and drastically reduce your power footprint.