Background

The Weimer Group, a well recognized regional insurance company with offices in Perkasie and Souderton, Pennsylvania, underwent a major network restructuring earlier this year. The company, which was founded in 1968, had a legacy network system that contained a Compaq Proliant server running Microsoft NT 4.0 at each of it’s facilities under one domain. The two facilities networks were interconnected through a point-to-point T1 line with Cisco 2500 routers. One of the fileservers housed the business e-mail system, Microsoft Exchange 5.5. Internet access was channeled through a dedicated T1 line on the Perkasie office, with a backup connection through a broadband connection in the Souderton office. Overall, this network design had worked quite well since the late 1990s. Microsoft software and insurance vertical applications ran their business operations well, but gradually, application support was eroding for the MS NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 based system.

The network is rock solid… but applications dictate a need for change

Dean Wimmer and Dave Beck, The Weimer Group principal partners, met with MSP staff in late 2004 to discuss an IT strategy to upgrade the company’s network. TWG had been a MSP client for a number of years and had partnered on a number of projects with great success. With a ‘Solutions Plus Service Agreement’ in place since 2000, MSP had acted as their business’s ‘Virtual Computer company’ over this time, assisting in support of the network as needed. In those 5 years, many incremental improvements had been made to the network; server hardware was upgraded to Compaq Proliant systems, broadband connectivity had been added, Symantec AV console had been installed, Veritas Backup Exec installed as backup standard, wireless access added, and all clients had been updated to XPPro. But to this point, the core Network Operating and Mail system remained.

Over 2004, Dean and Dave began noticing NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 were becoming limiting factors in their ability to keep current with their company software applications. Dean had found that a few key applications that were to be updated this year required newer OS versions. As TWG is proactive in use of technology and plan exceedingly well, the problem needed to be addressed. TWG wanted to update their network, but a strict condition was that the project could not interfere business productivity- there could be no down time.

Micro Solutions Plus recommends a solution to update The Weimer Group network

MSP recommended a solution of upgrading TWG’s two key company fileservers to Microsoft Windows 2003, and installing a 3rd fileserver to be a dedicated MS Exchange 2003 mail server. The project was agreed upon, and phase I was to add a new HP Proliant ML350 server running Windows 2003 and MS Exchange 2003. This introduced Active Directory to their network, and with the two Exchange servers (2003 and 5.5) on the network simultaneously, we were able to port over users, mailboxes, and mail data. This process went flawlessly, and TWG was now live using Exchange 2003. Newer Symantec and Veritas programs were now able to be implemented.

Phase II was a truly creative solution done by ‘Login Script Wiz’ Jason Jaegers! Jason ported all data and shares from Souderton’s NT 4.0 server to the newly installed Exchange server. He then used login scripts to redirect drive maps to the 2003 server. The copy job and login script change occurred off hours. When users arrived the next day, it was seamless to them that they were running from a different fileserver. Jason was then able to pull the old server from production. At a planned date in next few weeks, the old fileserver was scratch loaded with Windows 2003 server and taken to the Perkasie office. Placed online, the original NT 4.0 server’s data was transferred to the new 2003 server and the Perkasie login script edited to point to the new 2003 server. Again, this was done off hours with zero interruption of company business. Finally, this step was repeated with the original Perkasie’s NT 4.0 server being brought back to Souderton and implemented as their 2003 file and print server.

A juggling act bar none! Over a few week period, the client had achieved their goal of a Windows and Exchange 2003 based network, having met the goal of no downtime. And now a foundation exists that makes TWG compatible with the future.