In The Nick Of Time

Most IT solution providers are aware of this crisis. You have worked for
months on designing a project, have allocated resources for it, have started the
groundwork; when suddenly the client decides to junk the deal. This is enough to
have the red beacon flashing at the corporate offices.

New Delhi-based PC Solu­tions was faced with a similar situation but it
managed to offer the client other options and retained the client, with some
tweaking of the original project.

The client was a major financial security trading and investment
organization. They wanted an existing domain and mail setup in a co-located
datacenter. Since there was no local domain and messaging servers present, the
customer wanted to have local setup integrated with collocated infrastructure.

This made the project difficult to be manage and this was essentially because
the customer was not willing to give downtime, though under normal circumstances
a minimum of  24-28 hours of downtime is required.

Unique project

The project basically revolved around creation of child domain architecture
and implementation of exchange 2003 front-end and backend architecture at the
client's offices in Gurgaon and Mumbai, which involved about 5,000 users across
the country. The project hence was valued at approximately Rs 1.5 crore,
including hardware, software and services.

The client had given clear instructions that they wanted the problem to be
sought as quickly as possible and hence the entire team at PC Solutions wrapped
up the project within two months itself.

The project on a whole was a unique experience for PC Solutions. The fact
that the entire project had to be implemented with '0' or negligible downtime,
made it a huge challenge for the entire team.

“This was not easy for us as we went for downtime in pieces and technological
limitations were not permitting us to deliver a project under such
circums­tances,” mentioned Devendra Taneja, CEO, PC Solutions.

Client instructions

When it comes to messaging, the client had loads of e-mails coming from
their customers and other vendors and related partners. As a result the
information load increasing.

This traffic however, was earlier hitting Mumbai only. But over time the
organization's head office at Gurgaon was also getting affected. Thus PC
Solutions had to connect the Mumbai office to the Gurgaon one via the local
set-up and when the client was supposed to access the mail they were first
supposed to connect to Mumbai and then access their mails. But because there was
no proper connectivity in place they were not able to access their mails and
thus they were unable to process the requests from their customers, shareholders
and traders.

This was a problem and they were not able to extend the domain to Gurgaon
because these servers were collocated in some other datacenters and hence
outsourced. They had taken rack space for their datacenter.

The client wanted some local setup which should have been integrated with
their outsource setup so that whenever a mail was sent to them it used to come
to them locally and when the set-up was down in Mumbai it was routed to Gurgaon.

This would then reduce the downtime in the event of disconnection between
locations. In a nutshell the client had stated that the team from PC Solutions
should not ask for high down­times during the migration process. In addition
they also laid emphasis on the fact that applications should be impacted while
the project was being rolled out.

The client further added that there should be no changes to user's desktops
in terms of working environment after the migration process was comple­ted. They
also wanted the messaging system to be imple­mented with high availability
preferably Windows and MS Exchange-based clustering on SAN environment. The
client demanded that their migration activities be seamless and its impact on
normal working hours should be negligible again.

Design key point

In order to fulfill the client's requirement three people were deployed for
server and network level activities and five team members handled client end
migration activities. However, their machines in Gurgaon were not a part of the
domain in Mumbai and hence they were unable to implement any of their security
policy.

The client was facing problem because the local set up was not connected to
the same domain. So the solution was structured in a way that the client's
demands were effectively met. A child domain concept was introduced to achieve
better security control on the domain objects and this child domain was put in
Mumbai and at Gurgaon as well. Earlier the practice was that if the client was
not in domain, any policy that was deployed had to go to each individual
machine. Doing this was a difficult, time consuming and laborious task.

The other problem was that if the client shifted from the messaging
environment from Mumbai to Gurgaon how could it have maintained high
availability. Therefore a Windows 2003 Enterprise cluster with MS Exchange 2003
cluster was introduced to achieve High Availability in SAN Environment. Thus if
one of the mail server was down it will automatically be accessible in the
alternate mail server.

In addition mail flow was designed within organization and thus an external
world was designed, keeping in mind the fastest deliveries and improved
security. Multiple database storage were also designed to keep high uptime
during preventive maintenance in future.

Challenges while working

In order to meet the client's demand on time the entire project plan was
drafted carefully so that PC Solutions had customer's approval well in advance.
Another key point that the team kept in mind was that the project was
implemented in a phased manner to reduce the impact of changes made and reduce
the downtime to a negligible level.

In addition at the client's end, migration was done in a phased manner to
achieve better stability and smoother migration. In the process PC Solutions had
to face a set of challenges, which were dealt without getting perturbed.

Ashish Khare, GM-Project, PC Solutions stated, “The key challenge in the
project was that the same IP address scheme was applicable at both the
locations, and solutions were thus delivered through different routing mechanism
at routing devices levels.”

When you have an IT setup in different locations and you have to integrate
the same as the systems are working in isolation problems start emerging. Both
the locations had the same IP address and hence it was creating a whole lot of
confusion as the address could not have been changed overnight as this would
have lead to major downtime. Hence the team routed the project in such a way
that the IP address did not conflict.

Lessons learnt

“There was a time when the network team at the client's place had almost
given up and were willing to dismiss the project,” mentioned Khare. But PC
Solutions gave them appropriate solutions and in the process it too learnt a big
lesson.

They realized that it was imperative that they should have first seen the
entire network infrastructure at the client's end and then proceeded further.
The team had never thought that the company would be having same IP address and
thus felt that they should have done an in-depth study before deploying the
project.

But in the end they had a happy client, who said, albeit anonymously, “We
were looking for more security and manageability and PC Solution helped us
realize that. The entire infrastructure is now easy to manage. For example,
earlier, to deploy any software we had to go to each and every system
individually and now I can deploy it in the centralized server. The messaging
system has improved as well and has become much faster because we now have a
local mailing system for each user here.”

This shows that where there is a will, there is a well functioning network.

POOJA SHARMA

poojas@cybermedia.co.in