Network Refresh case study

Network Refresh case study

The client is a leading Australian online advertising and marketing organisation. O2 Networks was engaged to rationalise and consolidate their entire network infrastructure, a four-year project commencing in 2009.

Like many large organisations, separate projects and business units had become "islands" of technology, each supporting legacy platforms with no lifecycle management strategy and no plans for retirement and renewal of infrastructure.

There was significant duplication of technology, as every business unit had its own independent infrastructure. The problem multiplied as the client gained new business units through acquisition.

The aim of our project is to significantly reduce the data centre footprint and operational complexity, to improve the client's ability to support their network environment, and to reduce operational complexity by reducing the number of different environments.

Shared services environment simplifies support needs

At the beginning of each year, we define the network requirements for the next three years, then align them with mini-projects to consolidate and deactivate legacy environments, and to migrate infrastructure.

The first phase of the project has been to build a shared services environment using a multitenanted hosting platform. All retired infrastructure is migrated to this platform, and configured using templates for rapid deployment and simplified support needs.

As part of the project, we have deployed a wide range of best-of-breed technologies from leading vendors.

The results: big savings and a solid plan for the future

We have reduced the number of environments the client has to support from 25 to 10. As a result, many racks of equipment have been retired, and each environment has been lifecycle managed to extend the lifespan of each platform.

The savings generated by a reduction in environments and infrastructure are dwarfed by the savings in support costs and the efficiencies introduced by eliminating duplicate technologies.

Rather than letting problems fester and ending up with totally obsolete technology, the client is now well-positioned to take advantage of the most cutting-edge technologies, with O2 Networks as their trusted partner.

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