The Northern Constabulary adopts a thin client-based
architecture
The Northern Constabulary is consolidating its desktops on a thin
client architecture to lower support costs and increase the control
it has over its IT.
The police force covers the Highlands and Islands region of
Scotland - an area of 15,000 square miles. It has about 1,000 staff
split into eight divisions.
Neville Lee, Northern Constabulary's IT customer services manager,
who has responsibility for desktops, said the move to thin client
terminals has helped solve the problem of providing IT support to
remote sites.
Illustrating the problem, he said getting to the Shetlands from
the mainland takes 14 hours, which caused a problem when the
force's five support staff had to visit every site to perform
updates for Y2K.
"We rely quite heavily on the network and the support costs were
high," said Lee.
The old IT architecture, based around Novell Netware, was also
slow, particularly in the wide area network links, and it was hard
to install new applications.
The force began its move to thin client terminals in the third
quarter of 2001 by rolling out Citrix Metaframe.
Initially it used its old Windows 3.11 PCs as Dos clients before
turning to supplier Neoware for purpose-built thin client terminals
- 3000 series boxes running Windows CE. The police force now has
250 thin client terminals in operation.
Lee said the new architecture has increased the control his
department has over the police force's IT because new applications
can be delivered centrally via Citrix, and the Neoware thin client
desktops can be controlled remotely by support staff. E-mail is
faster and the Wan links have less to cope with.
The police force has saved a lot on support costs and time spent
travelling to sites has been cut dramatically, said Lee.
The savings have helped fund an upgrade from traditional CRT
monitors to flat-screen TFT monitors and this year the force is
cutting its PC replacement programme by 50% to £25,000. "The thin
clients have paid from themselves," Lee said.
The force's ability to respond quickly to major incidents such as
murders has also improved. Lee explained that in such cases the
force needs to set up an incident room at the scene with PCs
running Holmes 2 - a specialised police application for
investigating crimes.
Lee said using regular PCs in the incident rooms was previously a
"nightmare" because of the slow network connections. The new thin
client-based incident rooms can be deployed more quickly and have
better connections and data rates.
As there is no data on the thin clients - it resides on servers -
security is improved and the machines can be shipped around more
safely. The Neoware units also use 128-bit encryption to protect
data.