The company health insurance fund, ZF & Partner, can look back at a long tradition. The company health insurance for social security of employees came into being three years after establishing the ZF Friedrichshafen AG, which today ranks among the leading automobile manufacturer groups for motor power and vehicle engineering. At the time of establishing the company, the health insurance had 324 members. From this small beginning developed a strong insurance company. Today, the company health insurance fund, ZF & Partner, includes over 62,500 insured persons. To offer all members highly qualified services, it needs a corresponding extended and sophisticated IT infrastructure. Employees need access to all relevant data from over 110 workstations at 13 locations.


Server-based Computing - The central IT concept

To guarantee an optimum data throughput, it was decided to go in for a so-called Server-based computing architecture. This means that all necessary data and applications are kept on central Servers. Access is provided via Thin Clients, slim terminals that are tailored exactly to the needs of the relevant employees and to save on the use of expensive and complicated PCs. Both standard office applications and UNIX-based host applications can be called and used through Thin Clients via appropriate terminal servers. Another advantage of Thin Clients lies in the central administration of end devices. Thus, Thin Clients can be monitored and controlled via a central administration console. Time consuming single-station administration would now be a thing of the past.


Starting with obstacles

In fact very often, firstly theory and practise clearly deviate from one another. The Thin Clients that were used in the ZF & Partner company health insurance fund until spring 2002 did not satisfy all the requirements with regard to administratability and flexibility. Reason enough for Andreas Hepperle, the IT Manager of the ZF & Partner, company health insurance fund, to look for an appropriate, more efficient substitute. He found this in IGEL Technology, the Thin Client manufacturer. The German thin client specialists were convincing not due to an apparent higher processing quality, rather due to a clearly higher flexibility in all hardware and software issues. The choice was for the IGEL 416 Winestra Client. The multisession-capable device enabled access not only to the host applications but also to all local applications via an end device. The terminal emulation that is included also supports the trimodal keyboard from Siemens, which is mandatory for optimum utilisation of the ISKV software for administration and storage of insured persons data. Moreover, even the two communication protocols, ICA (Independent Communication Architecture) and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) are available. These protocols assure smooth data exchange with the application servers under Citrix MetaFrame and the Windows Terminal Servers. In addition, the integrated PCI interface in the IGEL-416 Winestra also enables the integration of ISDN cards. Hence, for the first time, even workstations at offsite locations could be provided with slim computers. Access is via remote access dial-up facility. As only keyboard commands and screen information needs to be exchanged between terminal and Servers, a problem-free data communication can be assured here even at low bandwidth. The actual computer load remains on the Servers.


An investment with future

With a 300 MHz NSC Geode GX1 processor, a 4-MB onboard graphics and 32 MB working memory, the IGEL Client is sufficient and in addition, also comes with definite performance reserves for future applications. The Client firmware is provided on a separate 16 MB flash storage. It comes with the embedded Flash Linux and other software components, which includes the Emulations Suite, Powerterm. The operating system can be enhanced or replaced at any time owing to the flexible Flash storage, without needing a deeper intervention in the hardware. The lifecycle of a thin client is estimated at five years and is thus essentially higher than that of a comparable classical workstation computer.


Faith is good. Control is better

However, an essential factor for introducing the IGEL thin clients lies in the administration tool, IGEL Remote Manager. The central administration is carried out based on a SQL database, which contains all Client settings. The management console is programmed platform-independent in Java so that the administrator is not bound to a fixed location. So, group profiles that certainly simplify the corresponding administration flows can also be created. All Clients assigned to a group can be configured in parallel in only a few steps. The clear interface allows easy allocation of the individual terminals and profiles. The configuration is similarly done via the management console. To prevent any kind of misuse, the communication between database, Clients and the management console is essentially carried out via an SSL encoded link. Moreover, the particularly sensitive connections between database and the Clients is carried out certificate-based in a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).

The IT department staff were considerably relieved by this form of central management. All Clients are almost easily interchangeable owing to the homogeneous configuration and can be administered conveniently. The respective firmware updates can be easily downloaded from the Internet via FTP and then finally installed on the end devices via the internal network, so that time-consuming single-station support is no longer needed. Even for bigger tasks, the IGEL Remote Manager has proved to be impressive; so, an internal migration to a new computer centre is carried out. Andreas Hepperle, the IT Manager: "We could centrally implement all necessary adjustments within a few hours. Earlier, with the previous system such an implementation would have taken us days.'


Access for all - The Server architecture

The Servers form the corresponding core component of the Thin Client installation at the ZF & Partner, company health insurance fund. A total of ten Servers with the Windows Server 2003 operating system, of which three as Terminal Servers form the appropriate basis. This Server farm includes the domain controller, the file and archive and mail Servers. The complete data communication is carried out via Citrix MetaFrame XPa. The possibility of efficient data compression as well as uniform distribution of all resources through load balancing formed the foundation on which the decision for Citrix MetaFrame was made.


More to come

At present, 70 of the 100 Thin Client workstations are equipped with IGEL Clients, an expansion is planned for within the next few months. Andreas Hepperle also lays importance on Server-based Computing with IGEL. "For us, the introduction of Thin Clients has turned out to be profitable, and with IGEL we have found a flexible partner that grasps our needs accurately and quickly. In times where saving on administration costs even in the health care sector is necessary, we have decided to support our customers with an efficient and slim infrastructure. For us, the focus is on services that we offer our customers and not on an inadequate IT superstructure. We have taken care of this and intend to follow this path even in future.'


www.igel.com