Collet Zarzycki
London-based design and architecture practice improves network infrastructure with server upgrade and support
customer profile
Collet Zarzycki is a design and architecture practice that was founded in 1995. Based in West London, they now comprise of a team of 25 people with interlocking skills as well as a huge network of outside specialists, artists and craft people.
Their projects have ranged from the UK to Switzerland, France, Italy and even as far afield as South Africa. Every project is tackled sympathetically from the conceptual stages of architecture, to interiors, furniture and finally landscape design.
the problem
Over the last few years the requirement for disk space for file storage has greatly increased, placing an increased strain on their IT infrastructure. In particular, their network server needed to be of higher specification and resilient to failure. As a design and architecture practice, Collet Zarzycki need to store a large amount of graphic files on their server and this was causing problems as Lily Sung, Finance manager at the practice explained.
"The server's performance was getting slower and slower and regularly crashed. This was affecting the productivity of our staff and it was imperative that we took action to sort it."
why Octavia
Octavia have been Collet Zarzycki’s IT partner for a number of years and so when approached with the problem initially carried out a survey of the practice’s IT infrastructure to ascertain the scope of the problem and to enable them to propose a solution.
Based in the heart of London since 1998, Octavia has a proven track record of successfully delivering IT solutions, IT systems and IT support for organisations throughout the UK. Their expertise in planning and delivering integrated solutions is underpinned by both their deep understanding of the technology as well as an in-depth knowledge of how to apply it to achieve maximum benefit for their customers.
the solution
Octavia implemented and installed a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server. This included 6 hard drives in 2 RAID configurations with a total capacity of 1.344TB. As well as providing the server a PowerVault tape drive was installed in conjunction with Symantec Backup Exec to take care of all data recovery requirements. They also installed a new 48 port switch and replaced an old printer hub with a new 4 port switch, both designed to speed up network performance.
Consultants from Octavia setup the Dell server with a new Domain architecture utilising Windows Server 2008 Small Business Server to deliver increased IT security and ease of management. With this in place they migrated all the existing Microsoft Exchange and other company data from the old server and consolidated it on the new one. Finally, they decommissioned the 2 existing servers.
customer experience
By project managing the entire server upgrade Octavia’s consultants were able to deliver a turnkey solution to Collet Zarzycki. As well as the usual design, implementation and data migration this included connecting users and reconfiguring workstations and remote user’s laptops to the new Active Directory configuration in the Windows network server.
A significant proportion of the work had to be undertaken outside normal working hours to ensure minimum inconvenience to the practice's staff. Simon Evans, senior technical consultant at Octavia said, "The amount of work that has to be carried out in the background to ensure a smooth migration is quite high. From migrating user profiles and home folders to the new server through to setting up new home folders, roaming profiles, shared mailboxes and calendars is all very time consuming but vital in terms of the overall project."
