A recipe for an excellent network

The first thing you notice at the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) is the polished finish of its reception entrance, almost corporate in style. The large premises, home to 70 PCs and their users, seem to have lost none of their gleam during 4 years of occupancy and inside, the staff busy away silently producing reports, practice guides and research briefings with an air of supreme efficiency.

An independent registered charity, SCIE develops and promotes knowledge about good practice in social care, to widen the many excellent (but localised) practices that already exist.

SCIE (pronounced 'Sky') is an organisation that practices what it preaches, namely: Excellence. And no less so than in the area of its own Information Technology systems. IT Manager Nishal Rooplal has constituted an in-house network around not just the traditional architecture of one or two servers, but fourteen, affording users a level of robustness normally only enjoyed by large enterprises; the advantage being that "when the library server was down for a while, the email and Intranet was still running", explains Nishal with the composure of someone who understands that long-term investment reduces short-term troubleshooting. The benefit that most other staff can continue to work in what would otherwise become a crisis is really coming home.

Although the multi-server network was fault tolerant, it was not as fast as users would have liked. "The Intranet was slow and some email clients took a few seconds to open". A sizeable IT upgrade project recently added the performance edge needed, with 19" flat screens, new inter-server backbone cabling giving 10 times more speed, 48-port switches (3Com 3870) and Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers.

"Now it's instant. It all saves more time. Browsing is much faster and the SCIEnet [Intranet] has seen a lot more use". SCIE has been wise enough to allow a judicious amount of 'play', as well as work-based material to populate the Intranet, realising that people are attracted to learn by dabbling with familiar items first. "All departments and groups have their own portals to share documents, even user portals, for instance to publish their daily events (like a blog), feedback from conferences - they even put up recipes!" We suspect this encouragement stems in part from the fact that the IT Manager is no mean chef himself.

The organisation has made a shrewd assessment of its resources, not merely in terms of computing specifications but their real estate too. Nishal elaborates, "If we didn't have these racks, the entire room would be full of computers. It's an inexpensive solution though we were lucky enough to take advantage of a year when Dell were giving away racks with every server purchase". The computers are layered vertically in columnised racks, an efficient arrangement that requires only one monitor to view any chosen server. "It saves having 14 machines with their own monitors and desks, which would be actually a lot of wasted space that we are renting".

Nishal decided not tackle the big upgrade on his own, but neither did he commission Co-Operative Systems to do it all either. "[Initially] I was encouraged to get a team of IT staff, but I decided not to go down that route as it wouldn't compare with the flexibility of getting Co-Op people on site. With your own team [and all the distractions present inside an organisation] there is no guarantee that the team always does what you want it to do. Also with permanent staff there is the cost of insurance, sick leave and holidays". SCIE allow a generous 31 days of the latter!

The work was completed over an August Bank Holiday with 37 PCs replaced and standardisation implemented throughout to Windows XP Pro, MS Office 2003, Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003, Terminal Server 2003. "Having a support company on hand makes a huge difference, especially as there is a good skill set to choose from".

And just exactly what is the function of the orange gonk on the server rack? "Oh, he looks after the network when I am away!", quips Nishal.