Case Studies

IT Management

• Project Plan Optimization
  A major U.S. beverage company decided to extend the firm's ERP package to a new overseas plant on a rush schedule, but the existing AIX servers lacked the necessary disk space. Migrating the ERP databases to new NetApp storage devices required an AIX version upgrade and network enhancements. We analyzed the project plans of the UNIX, storage and networking teams and carefully interwove them to meet tight project deadlines.
   
• Support Staffing Analysis
  A U.S. corporation with large engineering and IT staffs struggled when applying corporate standards to smaller subsidiaries. One location even considered outsourcing the work to try to avoid the problems. We collated the conflicting opinions of local management, IT departments and engineering offices and recommended an approach to reduce support costs.
   
• Vendor Proposal Review
  One smaller client had a home-grown order management website badly in need of updating. After they received widely varied price quotes from different developers, we walked the business owners through the proposals and determined a realistic budget for the project.

• JavaScript LDAP Administration Tool
  One client wanted to implement an LDAP directory to centralize logins across their AIX, Solaris and Linux servers. Commercial user administration packages were outside the project budget, but open source solutions lacked some tools. We wrote an easy-to-use JavaScript front end to an LDAP web service so that user administration tasks could be delegated to the helpdesk.
   
• Documentation Portal
  Trainers for a UNIX support team had collected how-to snippets documenting various server maintenance procedures. We customized a web site to collect this documentation, make it searchable, track changes made by various administrators and insure compliance with corporate documentation review policies.

• Automated Security Audit and Reporting
  After several audits found minor but sloppy mistakes, we wrote a Perl script to compare AIX server security and configuration settings with corporate standards. These results were reported daily through the enterprise server status monitoring tool and e-mailed weekly to both server administrators and managers.
   
• Cost-Effective High Availability
  One customer sought round-the-clock availability of critical applications, but found vendors' high-availability solutions caused more problems than they solved. False positives took down the very servers the software should have protected. At other times configuration discrepancies prevented applications from running on the standby server. We helped implement a UNIX shell script solution that guaranteed consistent application startup across servers and provided administrators a non-automated yet rapid method to restart failed applications on both primary and standby hardware.