Case Studies

Large Business Example

The Customer

A large, not for profit, independent Housing Association, providing high quality homes at affordable rents. It also offers housing advice and support to people in housing need, primarily within the local Metropolitan Borough. The Trust manages over 15,000 homes, with a range of housing stock which includes houses, bungalows, sheltered housing schemes, low rise and multi-storey accommodation.

The Requirement

Until the summer of 2002, the Housing Trust was the Housing Department of a large Metropolitan Borough Council. A decision had been made to break away from the Council, a consequence of which required the Housing Trust to provide their own IT services to their user base. When planning for the move began, it was immediately realised that this would be an ideal opportunity to modernise the IT infrastructure by utilising the latest hardware, operating systems and directory services. A solution was subsequently designed based on the Council's “Best Value” framework. Due to the continued use of legacy software it was necessary to maintain access to the existing data servers.

As with most projects of this nature, the major stumbling blocks in deploying the new solution were the timescales available for completion of the various tasks. There was no room for any slippage because the old Council Department's metamorphosis into the Housing Trust would literally take place over night. Ample time was available for setting up the new server environments, but the existing server equipment would be in use on the Metropolitan Borough Council's network until Friday afternoon and would require redeploying onto the new Housing Trust network by 8am Monday morning - all this to be achieved without any perceived downtime for the users.

The Solution

There were several stages involved in deploying the new infrastructure: -

The Housing Trust negotiated for continued use of the Council's internet pipe via their own IP addresses, but they were required to provide their own firewall protection. A Microsoft ISA 2000 server was deployed that provided this, as well as a URL caching facility.
A new Active Directory domain controller was deployed to facilitate management of users and their desktops. This server was also configured to back up all data on the network.
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server was deployed to provide email and calendaring services to the new organisation. This included migrating all user data from the existing Metropolitan Borough Council's user mailboxes over the course of a weekend.
Around a third of the Trust's users utilised a Windows NT4 Terminal Services desktop for their computing needs. The three servers that supplied this environment were rebuilt over the course of a weekend to be Windows 2000-based, bringing the terminal user desktops into line with the Windows 2000 Professional that was to be deployed throughout the Trust's PC user base.
Two new Windows 2000 Terminal Servers were deployed alongside a new database server to provide access to a new financial management package that the Trust had implemented.
The existing Novell Netware server was removed from the Metropolitan Borough Council's NDS tree and a new tree was created for the Housing Trust organisation. All existing users, groups, data and associated permissions were migrated to the new tree.
A Packet Dynamics Content Filtering Appliance was deployed to provide secure, audited internet access for Housing Trust users.
Computer Associates eTrust Anti-virus was deployed across all servers and desktops.

The Outcome

The decision to employ the Council's “Best Value” framework when designing the solution has eased the implementation of several recent network enhancements. It has not been necessary to replace or upgrade any of the original hardware to facilitate the new equipment, thus justifying the expense and complexity of the original migration project.

The Housing Trust have built on the use of ISA 2000 as their Internet firewall by implementing remote systems support via secure VPN access. All of their servers have remote access services installed by default. This allows their software suppliers to provide a faster response when problems occur and has greatly reduced the number of site visits required, thus saving the Trust money in call-out fees.

Another use of the ISA 2000 server has been to facilitate an off-site disaster recovery network (located at Envision's offices in Standish) utilising similar hardware to that found at the main Housing Trust office. This disaster recovery network is linked into the main network via a VPN connection and helps maintain a real-time copy of all directory service data. In the event of a disaster occurring, the most recent backup tape can be used to restore data without the need to recover the directory services first, thus saving considerable time in providing a fully-functional remote access service to the Housing Trust users.