Pre-requisite check and prep work.

First job was to nip round the building and see exactly what we were dealing with.

It quickly became obvious that bottlenecks were present, dodgy equipment was being used and all the standard networking, Microsoft, IBM-PC and all other best practices were not being used, even slightly.

A particularly mismatched set of networking infrastructure is currently in use with misconfigurations, less than reliable interconnection methods and a total lack of redundancy throughout the building which leaves us with a large pause for thought. If we're to land ourselves ahead of the legal IT circle then we need to get our act together. And this thought is the basis for our large project.

Examining the server and data rooms reveals that we have an abundance of fiber running throughout the structure of the building which is being HUGELY under-utilised. The first part of the project will be to use this to our advantage without any new fiber patching, re-routing or splicing (therefore giving us a good headstart for minimal outlay).

All equipment we currently use is being retired and replaced with industry-standard 'recognisable' Manufacturer's hardware (read Hewlett Packard, here) in preparation for the forthcoming 'Software and Services Refresh' later this year.

This 'refresh' equates to the following being updated:

Data Rooms - Switching and Routing Gear. Fiber cabling.
Server Room - Switching and Routing Gear. All Servers. Shared Storage (SAN). Links between Servers, Storage and Main Network. Fiber and quick Ethernet cabling. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) on different phases.

Check back soon!

James.