Farrar Media International

Server upgrade.

Established in 1988, Farrar Media is now one of Europe's leading international media consultancies. Farrar Media offer advertisers and their agencies truly innovative global communication strategies allied to a thorough, efficient and competitive media planning and buying service.

Requirements

Downtime is not an option for Farrar Media as they rely heavily on their IT infrastructure in order for their business to run efficiently. A new server was required to replace their existing ailing Windows 2000 Small Business server, as reliability was starting to become a problem due to the increased demands on the business.

Proposal

After an initial consultation meeting, Our IT Department proposed to supply and install a new rack mounted server in Farrar Media's London office to replace the existing hardware. We recommended Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 to replace the existing out of date operating system, ensuring that this server would cope with the future requirements of the company. As minimal downtime and reliability were paramount, we recommended SAS disks to be used in the new server along with a RAID 5 configuration. This type of storage has a reputation for stability and greater lifespan and the RAID configuration ensures minimal downtime in the event of hardware failure. Once the proposal was agreed, a project manager was assigned to plan the project implementation.

Project implementation

The server upgrade was completed in just four days by two of our field engineers. During this time frame a new server rack was installed, new server hardware was installed and configured and all company data was migrated from the existing hardware to the new server. Once the new server was ready, all workstations were then added to the new domain and all hardware peripherals were configured to the new network. A day was then spent testing the network including all user accounts, peripherals, applications and backups. On the final day the old hardware was decommissioned and an engineer attended site to resolve any post installation issues may arise. No disruption to Farrar Media's normal working routine was experienced as the migration of data to the new hardware was conducted over a weekend period.

Conclusion

Thanks to Our IT Department, Farrar Media now have a cost effective, efficient and reliable IT infrastructure that has maximum uptime and requires minimal maintenance.