Marist College, Canberra - Case Study

Service Desk services and project work

OPC has provided support to Marist College Canberra for over five years, ranging from large projects to full time Service Desk support and IT management.

Background

Marist College Canberra is an all-boys independent Catholic school founded in 1968. The college is situated on 15 hectares and provides boys from years 4-12 with a well-rounded education.

OPC’s Account Manager for Marist has taken a proactive role in exposing the College to new technologies such as Blade and Storage Area Networks during technology roadmap briefings.

The Challenges

OPC’s Service Desk duties included the day to day management of numerous printers, switches, over 80 applications, 1800 end users and 440 computers consisting of 144 WYSE terminals across classrooms, staff rooms and student labs.

OPC responded to over 50 phone calls per day and managed incidents with the existing Service Desk software and LANDesk that OPC had previously installed to manage the Marist network efficiently.

When OPC started its contract with Marist the College had a long standing issue of network congestion and network freezing several times a day. This affected all users during lessons, especially when students logged in and out of the network.

Our Solutions

OPC utilised Microsoft tools and IBM Storage Manager to help identify the bottleneck. Together the tools highlighted that the main Active Directory authentication server was the root cause of the problem. OPC took steps to share the main domain authentication issues separating staff and student authentication, but while this led to increased performance it did not resolve the issue altogether.

OPC concluded that the cache on the storage controller was too small and during periods of intense use the controller kept freezing. OPC proposed two solutions and Marist opted to move the load to a server not connected to the Storage Area Network (SAN).

This would require the student roaming profiles being moved off the SAN to reduce the load. The issue was resolved and throughout the process OPC kept all Marist staff and students informed of all steps being taken via degradation messaging.

At then end of OPC’s contracted period saw that all projects assigned had been delivered, the Service Desk queue had been reduced to a minimal level and the Service Desk staff were working well as a team.

Projects included:

Microsoft Migration and Desktop Refresh

This project involved upgrading the College’s Intel Server platform to accommodate a migration from Novell Netware to a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 platform. OPC’s tasks included consultation, procurement, hardware implementation, ongoing support and maintenance of the proposed solution.

In addition, OPC managed the procurement and implementation of over 100 suitably compliant desktops and assisted in the development and deployment of the College’s DSOE. The image was deployed to all machines at the OPC Service Centre prior to delivery on site.

Desktop Implementation and ICT Relocation

OPC was successful in having our contract renewed as preferred supplier to Marist for a further twelve months.

Projects completed during this time were the ICT computer Centre relocation, an APC Infrastructure rack and power solution, the procurement and deployment of a further 50 desktops preloaded with the College DSOE and a temporary switch solution. OPC consulted on the design of the new ICT centre which needed to accommodate four staff, provide counter service, house the College’s servers, communications devices and provide protected power to all work benches and equipment.

LANDesk Installation Project

OPC recommended the LANDesk toolset as a solution to the College for a desktop and application management tool. OPC prepared a planning document outlining the tasks involved in the upgrades an included appropriate test, risk and rollback procedures in accordance with our Change and Release Management protocols.

OPC assisted Marist with the procurement of LANDesk software, licenses and a new server and, whilst issues were experienced during the installation, OPC remained in contact with the software vendor, taking ownership of the problems until they were completely and successfully resolved.

Storage Area Network (SAN) Migration Project

OPC and Marist College spent approximately twelve months planning the Storage migration. This involved numerous planning meetings and several visits to the IBM demonstration centre to plan the best fit solution that met Marist’s needs and budget.

OPC prepared a planning document outlining all tasks and procedures necessary to complete the project and procured all the required hardware.

OPC configured the SAN which included setting up the raid array, global hot spare, and the storage partitions (LUNS). OPC installed the SAN into the rack. The connectivity to the SAN was configured, Windows network operating system installed and data migration was tested. Marist staff verified the data migration and confirmed data integrity. The ICT manager approved the test phase milestone and OPC proceeded to the Implementation phase.

OPC configured six new blade servers and installed them into the Blade chassis. The SAN was configured to allow each server to connect to their partition, tape back configured, and OPC zoned the fibre switch in the Bladecentre chassis to improve performance. OPC installed and configured the operating systems on each blade and prepared the servers for the service and data migration. OPC reconfigured the tape unit to backup via the fibre card in the tape unit. OPC and Marist tested connectivity between the servers and the blades for performance and data integrity. OPC then assisted MCC with initial service and data migration.

This install was staged over twelve months; the first project being the installation of the Blade server with some services migrated, with the remaining services migrated after the SAN and remaining blades were implemented. The project was staged due to budget constraints for the College.

The Result

‘OPC has been providing IT service to Marist College for the past five years….OPC provides ongoing advice to MCC on new and emerging technologies suitable to our environment and has provided recommendations, design, integration and documentation for several major projects with zero downtime to MCC’s business continuity…’

Mr Ian Hewitt – Director of Learning and Teaching