Information Technology

Case Study 12

An Information Technology Project

A postal service urgently needed to upgrade it's national IT infrastructure consisting of 120 servers throughout the UK.   Servers varied in their configurations, firmware, and the applications that ran on them.   There was no complete record of the configurations, software versions etc, and application software and data was routinely being updated during the project.

We carried out an audit of all the machines, from hardware versions upwards.  An assessment was made of the requirements for each server.

A comprehensive schedule of updates was compiled to bring each of the servers up to their target specification, including hardware replacements.   This required careful change control to ensure that changes for one application did not adversely impact the changes for another, and that changes were appropriately scheduled within existing server workloads.   This massive upgrade programme was a success.

To make future upgrades easier, we created a configuration database, and a configuration management process to allow an accurate record of server status to be maintained.

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