The Business Challenge
Surrey County Council is the most densely populated Shire County in England with a population of 1.1 million people. The County is run by a two-tier system, comprising the County Council and 11 district/borough councils, with an annual budget of around £1 billion to provide services to the population of Surrey.
The Council's Domino environment grew significantly in the past 5 years, and with this growth came a number of administrative and infrastructure issues. For instance, the Council had old servers located in several locations throughout the County that were failing and causing large amounts of downtime. Domino administration became impossible to manage and increasingly costly. As a result, the confidence of the Council's user community in Domino was declining.
To improve service and reduce the cost of their infrastructure and maintenance, the Council decided to implement a highperformance platform on more robust hardware, migrate to a new operating system, and consolidate servers in a single, centralized location. As part of this infrastructure project, the Council decided to augment their administrative effort. Surrey County Council evaluated ServerAdmin Plus from Axceler and Intelliware® from Candle Corporation (acquired by IBM in June 2004) for the server consolidation project. The Council selected ServerAdmin Plus because it enabled them to clean up their Lotus environment prior to the server consolidation, find inactive databases as well as unused and orphaned mail files, and thereby save valuable time.
The Axceler Solution
ServerAdmin Plus allowed Surrey Council to perform essential analysis to their Notes infrastructure in preparation for their server consolidation project. They were able to clean up obsolete ACL entries and identify which applications were heavily used within the Council, as well as easily identify the inactive applications and email files to be archived.
The Result
With the new hardware and operating system in place, and the initial analysis work completed using ServerAdmin Plus, the Council started the process of centralizing and consolidating applications and mail files. ServerAdmin Plus enabled Surrey County Council to move mail files and applications seamlessly to end users, along with the associated end-user client changes. Desktop icons, replication information, and connection and location documents were automatically updated. The consolidation project ran incredibly smoothly. We moved everyone in controlled groups, by business unit. We did two to three runs a week in small batches of fifty to several hundred. Each batch ran overnight, and the work was completed when we arrived the next morning - requiring about an hour a day to tidy up loose ends," commented Steve Mabey, senior Notes consultant, Surrey County Council.
Surrey County Council consolidated eighteen servers down to twelve centrally located and managed servers. The reduction of servers provided an immediate benefit of cost savings on maintenance and administration. The resilience and level of service is greatly improved, and management and users are pleased with the improved service. Previously there were hours or days of unplanned downtime as opposed to only a few minutes a month today. The Notes team now has time to focus on other projects to support the Council.
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