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PENFORD IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT BEATS THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE |
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Written by Gavin Bainbridge
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About Penford
Penford Australia leverages its local manufacturing capacity in both Australia and New Zealand. Penford develop, manufacture and market vital wheat gluten, specialty starches and starch-based sweeteners for use in food and in industrial applications. The products are made from wheat, waxy maize, high amylose maize, regular (dent) maize, potato, rice and tapioca.
Penford market its products globally and as a subsidiary of Penford Corporation, a leading U.S. supplier of specialty starches. Penford access Penford Group products produced in North America.
The Mission
At the end of 2007 COGITA was commissioned to complete a project to integrate the separate domains into one trans-Tasman domain and upgrade the IT infrastructure.
The old system was a mix of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 on aging, failing servers in isolated 10MB networks. COGITA upgraded the server hardware and network appliances to Windows 2003.
The Scope
The project included networks in Tamworth, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.
COGITA’s Project Manager prepared detailed plans to co-ordinate the activities of 2 teams, one in each country. A Project Plan was constructed for the local activities and tasks and then consolidated so that dependant activities were aligned.
The Challenges
The communications element of the project provided more than the usual amount of challenges. Penford were going from 2 independent domains with some exchange of information to a single domain on a wide area network.
Their requirements were to:
• secure the existing networks,
• re-cable the Auckland Customer Services building,
• re-cable the Sydney server room,
• update the fibre in the Auckland and Sydney sites,
• raise the network speed to Gigabit at all sites and
• create a permanent link between Auckland and Sydney to support the new domain.
 Due to a lack of local infrastructure for high speed internet in Auckland, COGITA commissioned an internet radio link to be used as a dedicated WAN link to Penford Australia and installed a secure firewall to firewall VPN.
The WAN link is also essential for the strategy to centralise to a single ERP platform for both countries with disaster recovery capacity on each server.
The I.T. systems in Australia and New Zealand had grown independently over time on separate domains and were causing issues with data collaboration. More users needed to access data stored at other sites and the current security was preventing it, requiring more and more complicated workarounds that were starting to get messy. More users were travelling between the sites and were not able to access relevant data when they needed it. This project was the perfect opportunity to bring it all together on one domain alleviating the data access issues and paving the way for data collaboration using Distributed File Sharing and SharePoint.
Penford’s email system is Domino/Notes which had to be migrated to the new hardware and operating system. The server migration and a Lotus client version upgrade was completed without incident.
Hardware Update
A new server rack was setup and populated with new HP rack mounted servers, new high capacity tape drive backup solution and UPSs. All the network hardware was upgraded to HP Procurve Gigabit switches and where necessary network wiring was upgraded to category 6 standards. The servers were installed with Microsoft windows server 2003 R2 on a single domain and all applications and databases were successfully migrated. Microsoft’s Group Policy Objects and COGITA’s implementation of the Kaseya I.T. management system were used extensively to migrate to the new hardware.
Meeting SOX Standards
As Penford is owned by a listed North American company there was a requirement to meet the Sarbanes – Oxley (SOx) Audit requirements each year. COGITA manage the audit for Penford each year and this major upgrade also had to meet the SOX change management documentation requirements, which with COGITA’s SOX process experience the project was successfully completed and the post upgrade audit successfully passed.
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