Gas and Electric Company Makes Paperless Power Management Easy with Citrix NetScaler
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- NetScaler ADC
- XenApp
- XenDesktop
- XenMobile
- NetScaler SDX
Tech Stack
- Intel Xeon Processors
- Virtualization Technology
- Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) and Kentucky Utilities Company (KU) are part of the PPL Corporation family of companies, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. They are significant players in the electric utilities industry, serving nearly 1.3 million customers across 83 counties in Kentucky and five counties in Virginia. Additionally, they provide natural gas services to customers in Louisville and 16 surrounding counties. Known for their best-in-class customer satisfaction ratings, LG&E and KU employ nearly 3,600 people. Their operations are extensive, covering a large geographical area and a diverse customer base. The companies are committed to digital transformation and have been moving towards a paperless, mobile-powered workforce to enhance operational efficiency and customer service. This commitment is part of their broader strategy to improve user experience, productivity, and cost savings while ensuring high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
The Challenge
In order to empower field employees to access the information they need at any time, LG&E and KU have steadily moved toward mobile-powered workforces and paperless operations. In a power plant, mobile connections can be challenging. Wireless network connections aren’t always available in power plants, and when they are, they often suffer from interference. To combat the unreliable nature of wireless connections, the LG&E and KU development group turned to cellular connectivity and developed several internal-facing mobile applications that employees use on Apple iPad devices. In the early stages of the move to a cellular-based approach, employees were sometimes unable to connect to the mobile applications due to LG&E and KU’s previous load balancing solution ineffectively handling traffic. The solution couldn’t consistently deliver the needed capacity and reliability—which meant that employees couldn’t consistently access critical apps and data. To support more secure, reliable mobile-application access in the field and on employees’ personal devices, in 2012, LG&E and KU deployed Citrix XenMobile. Citrix NetScaler was already deployed to provide remote access to a small, internal virtual-desktop-infrastructure (VDI) environment. The companies also used a different load-balancing solution to support other critical application workloads, such as their existing SAP solution–based customer portal, Microsoft Exchange, and Oracle Financials. The addition of XenMobile, and the pending end-of-life of the existing load-balancing appliance, provided the opportunity for LG&E and KU to consolidate all their load-balancing requirements onto a single vendor platform—a move that could meet application delivery needs and lower overall operational costs.
The Solution
LG&E and KU chose NetScaler appliances, run on Intel Xeon processors, as their solution. The utilities upgraded their existing NetScaler solutions to the multitenant NetScaler SDX platform, which has allowed them to service additional applications and isolate virtual instances from a single appliance. With the NetScaler SDX solution, LG&E and KU use a single platform for all of their load-balancing needs and help secure access to critical enterprise application workloads and their entire Citrix infrastructure, which includes Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, and ShareFile. Field employees securely access applications from their mobile devices using the XenMobile and NetScaler SDX solutions. The NetScaler SDX appliance ensures the availability of XenMobile mobile-device management (MDM) servers during high-traffic surges, delivering 100-percent uptime for apps and data. LG&E and KU reduce costs by maintaining a digital “paper” trail that increases accuracy, response times, and productivity by removing the need to manage pieces of paper and the risk of losing those papers. LG&E and KU can now host quality assurance (QA) and production environments from the same NetScaler appliance, separating them as virtual instances on the multi-tenant NetScaler platform, NetScaler SDX. And because NetScaler appliances are run on Intel Xeon processors, LG&E and KU’s NetScaler solution takes advantage of the processor family’s improved encryption, performance, and data availability. NetScaler appliances also benefit from Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d), which improves performance for input/output (I/O) devices in virtualized environments.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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