Systems and network engineering to support acquisition
Snapshot
Kalles Group provides system and network engineering support to close employee infrastructure gap during transition after large acquisition.
Challenge
After a large-scale acquisition, our client experienced a gap in its employee infrastructure, and subsequently, the ability to maintain the newly acquired company’s systems infrastructure. Many of its systems were not built to best practices due to the large number of engineering teams who had built the purchased company’s systems, without the oversight of a global engineer. Moreover, the systems infrastructure in place had no accompanying documentation. Consequently, our client was unable to effectively manage many of its key processes.
Kalles Group was tasked with maintaining this system in lieu of client staff, and resolving issues resulting from the lack of appropriate hardware, infrastructure and oversight. Kalles Group consultants were also asked to analyze the nature of the system, and develop and implement a strategy to improve the system to meet the standards of our client’s national chain.
Approach
Kalles Group consultants worked closely with a team of client system administrators and desk site technicians to explore and map the system’s present state infrastructure, as well as identify and rectify system issues hindering the system from operating at full capacity. Account managers worked carefully to build trust and a cohesive team, and to educate senior leadership in the current deficiencies of the system. The resulting unity allowed the team to swiftly develop system requirements modeled after our client’s national standard, and draft improvement recommendations for future system states.
Results
Kalles Group provided support and solutions throughout our client’s transition in two key areas: systems engineering and network engineering.
Systems Engineering
Kalles Group deployed a senior systems engineer to provide global oversight of our client’s mission critical systems, and to maintain and improve our client’s infrastructure:
- Systems troubleshooting: Identified and documented system architecture, strengths and weaknesses, and requirements. Developed processes for the documentation of systems infrastructure enterprise-wide
- Engineering support: Maintained operational system for business critical objectives, providing systems engineering support for:
- Build-out of Hyper-V farm
- Windows Server 2008 servers
- Microsoft Exchange Server clusters
- Storage provisioning on CX420 SAN
- Systems improvement strategy: Recommended changes to hardware and infrastructure to align the malfunctioning system with best practices. Encouraged the purchase and implementation of higher-end equipment. Developed the system under the oversight of a global engineer
- Systems administration: Provided support to our client’s system administrator in systems administration duties across the company including Red Hat and CentOS 6 Linux administration
- Engineering department development: As an ongoing task, train onboarding personnel and provide thorough education on documentation processes, to ensure our client is capable of best practice systems maintenance and growth
Network Engineering
Kalles Group selected two experienced network engineers to integrate with our client’s personnel and network and provide:
- Engineering support: Maintained all client networking systems, providing key network engineering support to:
- Ensure end-to-end quality of video delivery service.o Implement multi-protocol label switching using a layer 2 tunnel connection
- Upgrade IOS routers, switches, and configurations across the network
- Remove unnecessary hardware components that were serving as blockages
- Comprehensive network topology: Diagramed topology of entire network and worked with on-site engineers to rebuild the client’s networks logically
- Network improvement strategy: Recommended changes to hardware and infrastructure to improve performance across the business. This included encouraging the purchase of upgraded network switches, to aggregate control of, and make visible, the entire network
- Network administration: Standardized administrative access and interface descriptions. Recovered administration of the unsecured and unstable public Wi-Fi network our client provides to employees and co-tenants for personal use.