MO Holdings Domain Controller Upgrade
The MO Holdings group of companies covers a diverse range of industries, including Property Development, Freight Forwarding, Recruitment and Internet Portals. This diversity whilst interesting, leads to daily challenges and testing situations.
Max Wilkinson, IT Manager, MO Holdings
We would look to Icomm Technologies for advice and where necessary installation for any future IT upgrades and changes.
Key Challenges
The main Domain Controller and E-mail server at MO Holdings central London Head Office had been outgrown, both in terms of aging server hardware and the limitations of Windows Small Business Server as an operating system.
Due to the 24/7 nature of both the Internet Portals and International Freight Forwarding, downtime during this project had to be negligible.
Historically MO Holdings had added hardware as growth had dictated without investigating other options and possible configurations. It was important that Icomm Technologies provided a stable and scalable solution.
The Solution
Icomm Technologies provided a Hewlett Packard Proliant server running Windows server 2003 as its operating system. It was decided to install Exchange 2003 due to licensing restrictions and to prevent incompatibility with legacy applications. This server hardware was specified so as to provide for all current needs and allow for future upgrade requirements.
An Engineer was briefed to provide Icomm Technologies “compassionate” install standards, so as to minimise any possible downtime or disruption. Initially the new server was run in tandem with the existing system, and once the engineer was satisfied with the configuration, the data, applications and finally the mailboxes and email settings were transferred.
Due to the critical nature of email within the MO Holdings business model it was decided to continue running the legacy server for a period of 1 week to ensure 100% that the changeover was complete. At this time the legacy server was retired from service within the Head Office, restored to its factory default settings and re-utilised at one of the remote sites.
Reaction
“Making any major changes to our IT infrastructure always raises concerns relating to downtime and ongoing issues, as an organisation Icomm Technologies have supported our existing network for the past 18 months but this was the first installation that they had undertaken. The knowledge of the assigned engineers was very impressive and the levels of expertise and professionalism during the install led to a minimum of disruption. We would look to Icomm Technologies for advice and where necessary installation for any future IT upgrades and changes.” Max Wilkinson, IT Manager, MO Holdings.
If you would like to know more about what Icomm could do to benefit your company, or have any other enquiries, please contact our sales team.
For more information on this article or the content discussed within, please contact Ian Callens on 0121 248 7931.
