Introduction

Glenfield Engineering is a Mechanical Engineering Services company serving the chemical, pharmaceutical, biotech, petrochemical, offshore, power, brewing, dairy and food industries in Ireland, the UK and Europe.

Problem: Lack of Capacity

Glenfield had made a positive decision to deploy a document management solution to aid in the storage and retrieval of a large amount of paper documents. However their Small Business Server was at its capacity in terms of space and resources and unable to support this solution. The server needed to be replaced with a more capable unit.

Challenge: Migration Difficulties

Glenfield have a number of remote users. It was not an option to simply replace their Small Business Server, as this would require all their remote users to have their laptops updated to link to the replacement Small Business Server. Also there was the question of migrating all the user info and email seamlessly to a new Small Business Server when both the old and new server had to share the same name.

Solution

Action Point carried out a procedure called a “swing migration” outside of normal business hours. A virtual “middle man” server was configured using VMWare and this was linked to the old Small Business Server. All of the user information, email and data were replicated onto this middle man server. Once active directory had been cleaned up and the old server removed, all of this information was replicated onto the new Small Business Server with the same name as the old server. As soon as all the information had been replicated, all of the applications had to be configured to work on the new server in the same way they had worked on the old server. Once the migration had been completed we tested all aspects of the configuration.

When users logged in the following business day they were able to work away as though nothing had happened. Of course now the server had ample capacity to support the new document management system and room for future growth.

Following on from the server migration a full audit of data storage was carried out to ensure that all of the users data was being captured by the backup system. This involved the redirection of desktop & My Document folders. We ensured that the default locations in all applications were set and controlled via group policies.

Technologies Used
Dell PowerEdge Server, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, VMWare Server

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