US Tennis Association saves cash through cloud services
By Chris Taylor
28/10/2011
The US Tennis Association (USTA) is making massive savings by running a number of key components in its Citrix XenApp environment off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Computer Weekly reports that the USTA has cut 100 per cent of its disaster recovery costs, 45 per cent of helpdesk costs, and 48 per cent of data hosting costs. It addition, the move to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) has enabled the association to drop a number of software licensing costs with Microsoft.
Peter Esposito, systems manager at USTA, says that the decision to move to the cloud has had no downsides whatsoever, considering that the previous network management system had to handle the Citrix XenApp infrastructure over 15 offices. The old system, he said, often suffered from network bandwidth issues due to the nature of datacentre technology.
In addition, "adding storage was expensive, configuration was complex, we faced high support costs, high upgrade costs and disaster recovery was expensive," revealed Esposito. "Adding applications for single offices affected all offices. Hardware outages affected all offices," he added.
After the move to AWS, users reportedly experienced faster log in times, due to a lack of roaming profiles, adds SWZ.com news. Company help desk queries regarding Citrix also fell 24 per cent just after the introduction between 2010 and 2011.
