An article in the Australia IT press reveals that a government department is trailing what looks like VDI combined with ACE. The article "'Log on anywhere' system on trial" is from Australia IT News.

The department is The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The interesting elements from the article are

• The use of ACE. This is most likely providing the View client. I wonder if its also virtualised with ThinApp. It also looks like the View secure gateway is not being used as it states that a virtual private network is being used.


• It operated fine from Jakarta. I did a basic ping test to Indonesia and it looks like 160ms, which is close to the noticeable 150ms latency for remote access.
  


• It was approved by the secure hats at the "Department Signals Directorate".


• They cite issues around accessing video and PDFs, the two examples I always use when discussing remote access with View. They don't say if they are using TCX, but using this remotely is going to be a challenge.


• By virtualising the department was able to reduce staff as natural attrition occurred.


• They were able to support peaks in demand, such as during census time. Can anyone else see the opportunity for federal departments federating their internal clouds to cater for peak load of each other?


• They were able to right size the resource allocation, and when it was different to expected they were able to adjust resources easily. "... but found the load was heavier than estimated. We were able to allocate double the resources to each of those servers." That sounds better than over spec'ing all individual machines just in case.
  
  
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics has 95 percent of its servers and applications running under VMware. Given this is our top number crunching agency (okay, maybe behind the tax office) who says you can't virtualise higher end work loads.
  

Its all very standard stuff to us virtualisation evangelists, there is no rocket science here. However when you stand back and look at what can be achieved for an organisation such as the ABS, it really makes sense as the best way to operate IT in 2009.