Conexus Credit Union Improves Citrix Performance

For years, Conexus Credit Union, a $4.1 billion-asset institution in Saskatchewan, Canada, was happy with its Citrix remote application delivery, but unhappy with login times of up to seven minutes that delayed employees from starting work in the morning. The problem was in the large user profiles that averaged seven to ten megabytes in size. (Citrix has a profile management system that's said to help with this problem, but the credit union has not investigated it.) Some of the credit union's 48 branches are small, with as few as two employees, and for several, high-speed connections are not available. Hence the problem in downloading large user profiles, which dictate which applications employees will receive on their desktop. The credit union has 40 Citrix servers delivering 200 apps to 800 people.

To solve this problem and to enable the credit union to upgrade its core banking system without incident, Conexus recently began deploying user virtualization software from AppSense. The software transfers users' personalization settings and application profiles to a file share, so that this information doesn't have to be downloaded every time a user logs on.

"Within a week of the first implementation, we saw huge gains," says Chandra Nauth-Misir, senior application administrator at Conexus.

The user virtualization software is also helping the bank migrate from thin clients to locked-down, low-cost PCs that offer the higher performance of 64-bit CPUs and will be able to run the new core banking apps.