Over the last few months we have been rebuilding our network
infrastructure which has been evolving with our business over the last 25 years.
The last major upgrade we did was in 2002 and since then there have been a lot
of additional servers and people added to the company. As we grew and added to
our network we kept adapting what we had to make it work, so there were many
work arounds and slowly but surely we grew a very complicated tapestry of a
network design. Last year we decided
that our engineering team would slowly rebuild our network infrastructure and
storage design in between working on customer issues and storage
implementations. In addition, we would change our phone system (VOIP) also, but
we manage the phone system as part of Administration and not part of our
Network.
Once we determined that a rebuild was required we had to
decide what was critical infrastructure and what order things could be worked
on. Based on what we learned about the new insurance rules on Cyber Liability
and Data Breach we determined that we had to keep all data and email functions
in house to remain in compliance with the insurance rules and the contracts we
had with customers in regards to data security.
Changing our Physical Servers into Virtual Machines was one
of the first things we did and the project went well. We were able to reduce
our footprint in our server rooms and we learned some tricks of the trade that
already have helped us in supporting our customers who are working in Virtual
Machine environments. In the process of virtualizing we were able to clean up
quite a few accumulated workarounds in our server architecture and we
modernized quite a few of the bits and pieces of our network.
Next came the task of upgrading our routing and switching
between our locations to help with our Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity plans. As our network had
grown over the last 12 years we had added some interesting work arounds that
allowed applications to talk to each other and created subnets for projects
that no longer existed. Throughout the process of re engineering our network we
had to keep considering what we had to be prepared for over the next few years
in business and as we got closer to completing the project a customer had a
request that we had not considered and we needed to consider whether to start
the work around process again or purchase new equipment to handle the new
customer request.
We also decided to outsource our phone system and got rid of
our Nortel Meridian system. We researched a lot of providers and when we
decided on the provider to go with we still did a lot of testing and tried to
anticipate everything that our company and our customers would request. Even
though we thought we had covered everything we would need, within a week we had
to figure out a way to insert a code into the displayed number to indicate the
call routing to the individual user along with a redesign of the way our follow
me and hunt groups worked.
Despite our attempt to remove all workarounds, it seems we
are constantly having to adapt one part of our Network, Servers or Storage to some new trigger or
requirement, whether it be a virus, malware or a new customer request or
service enhancement that we are going to provide. As a company we are all pretty adaptable to
new situations and customer requests, and as we rebuild our network it has become clear that no matter how much we try to build a logical
network design, inevitably we are going to have to have some workarounds in the
tapestry that is our Zerowait infrastructure.
