Cork City Council choose Origina to implement Network Strategy

Project

Introduction:

In 2007, Origina was requested to review the Cork City Council’s information communications and technology infrastructure, and plan a three year road map to identify and solve problematic areas and increase the current efficiencies of the council’s IT department.

After the first preliminary audit in October 2007; Origina identified that the overall objectives / aims should focus on the consolidation of the technology infrastructure; centralise IT management and simplify operations. Other opportunities for improvement were also uncovered, including: application ownership, backup, project delivery and local storage.

The Challenges / Issues:

The Cork City Council needed an external company that had the ability to act in a reactive support role. They also required that the independent company could provide highly skilled experts that could show them how to better manage the network infrastructure they currently had in place.

The council also requested that an external, mindshare Company had the skill set to deal with Microsoft exchange upgrades, backup and recovery, incident reporting and reducing overall power costs – these areas were of particular importance within the project.

All requirements needed to be addressed in order to allow the Council to run their IT infrastructure more efficiency and more importantly, lower the overall risk and costs.

The Solution:

When Origina’s technical consultants came on board they initially appraised the Council’s existing IT infrastructure and fully documented the issues that existed. Through this activity; Origina was able to pinpoint how the best practices in infrastructure management could be applied to resolve the current issues and ensure business continuity.

Origina identified the following key issues that need resolution. Each of these areas presented potential risks for the Council that needed to be addressed urgently.  Origina provided the necessary steps to resolve the issues below:

Network Infrastructure

The relocation of the server hardware from the old city hall computer room to a new state of the art computer space in the civic offices would resolve several issues that existed within the Cork City Council’s network infrastructure. This relocation would reduce the risk of hardware failures usually associated with components overheating – a problem resolved thanks to the new efficient cooling system that dissipated the heat generated by the server racks.

Backup and Recovery

Origina implemented a centralised backup system that resolved the outstanding time issues that affected how the IS operations team recovered a system. The knock on affect of being able to recover a system in a timelier manner, lead to reduced administrative overheads and improved consistency.  There was also an increase in success rates of how operations were backed up.

Exchange Infrastructure

By implementing a Microsoft Exchange upgrade, Cork City Council was able to improve the availability of their email infrastructure. Microsoft Exchange 2007 offered the Council an advanced solution with better clustering options including; continuous cluster replication – which uses two exchange servers that can access their own replica of the Exchange database. 

The Business Benefits:

This collaboration between Origina and the Cork City Council lead to four main beneficial areas including:

A highly secure data centre

The project between Origina and Cork City Council saw the consolidation of three out of date server rooms to a singular, designated virtual server environment which was contained in a state of the art facility that kept data secure and made it easier to manage. This solution was capable of meeting the Council’s storage and networking needs going forward. It also had the ability to facilitate the organisations high availability and disaster recovery requirements.

Substantial financial savings

The results of this project lead to major financial cost savings for the Council. Costs were saved through the removal of the three computer rooms – having these three separate rooms contribute to operation costs, power & cooling costs for each room, and administrative costs that were spiralling out of control which made the overall operation very inefficient and costly. The consolidation solution led to dramatic savings.

Project Management

This project was complex and detailed in nature. It involved the removal of critical data and infrastructure equipment being moved to high secure physical and virtual environment which would normally present a great degree of risk and potential high costs. Origina’s project management was part of the overall success of this network strategy project with Cork City Council. Origina’s technical experts was able to provide advice and guidance at every stage, such as pre – planning; implementation and the on-going process. The Origina team are still on hand to provide any assistance the technical team at Cork City Council may require in the future.

Click here to see our full list of IT solution case studies