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:: client overview
Nationwide housing association managing over 50,000 properties
throughout the country. The client specialises in rented, sheltered
and supported accommodation.
:: business challenges
The company had acquired several smaller housing associations in a bid to increase their business stronghold within the housing industry sector.
With plans to expand already in place and the need
to migrate their own network infrastructure, the addition of other housing associations only added to the complexity of the overall requirement.
The key areas identified by the business as requiring immediate change were; to create a new clean Windows based infrastructure, upgrade necessary hardware, introduce greater resilience and redundancy, and increase capacity for data storage and messaging.
Platform were approached to put forward a suitable solution. This included full ownership of the project, delivering all aspects of the client's own migration and merging newly acquired business units.
Platform's initial responsibilities included:
• delivering various technical workshops,
• producing a high level design overview,
• assisting with the creation of the PID,
• carrying out investigations at each site,
• producing a detailed design document,
• completing planning & POC stages,
• implementing new server infrastructure
• overseeing pilot & live migration stages
The key objective was to amalgamate four new housing associations of approximately 2,000 users to the newly created AD infrastructure.
Our involvement in this project was significant and one of our key objectives was to maintain close working relationships with all technical and managerial staff and to provide weekly updates to key personnel.
:: the solution
Individuals, within our consultancy team, were assigned to the project and became involved with the client at an early stage. This helped to maintain consistency and ensure full working knowledge of other related projects.
Once fully engaged, Platform produced a detailed messaging design based on Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Cluster services. The design catered for all of the requirements as set out by the client.
Although our specific requirement was to deliver the messaging solution, it was important to us to work closely with the other third-party companies involved. We wanted to ensure full integration and to further assist the client, in providing a seamless working relationship, between all parties involved.
The messaging infrastructure needed to be both highly resilient and have the ability to deliver high performance scaled for approximately 2000 users. A migration strategy also had to be employed so that the client could stage the migration between GroupWise and Exchange over a period of time.
A Microsoft Exchange 2003 Clustered solution was proposed, designed, and implemented entirely by Platform. Both Exchange Clusters were configured in an Active/Active/Passive arrangement and were connected to the new storage array and archiving solution.
The same infrastructure delivered at the head office was duplicated at the clients DR site. As the storage solution had the ability to replicate data between both sites, this was configured to provide the ability to effectively switch over to the DR site in the event of server or site failure.
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