The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town - Head Office)
FAQ 101
Q: How do you satisfy a client that has impossible needs to be fulfilled without breaking their trust and delivering on their expectations?
A: You need a team of unparalleled creative experts and two heroes. You need a Doron Shmaryahu and Riaan du Toit and a team of tireless technicians to back them up.
The client: The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town)
The brief:
* Johannesburg branch
* Setup Johannesburg office
* Data / cabling
* LAN / WAN infrastructure
* Replication and e-mail
* SQL interoperability
* VOIP awareness for Cape Town to Johannesburg
* Provide permanent high-speed access between the branches with sequence mirroring Peribits SM500
* Cape Town branch [HQ]
* Data / cabling
* PABX
* VPN server
* Exchange server
* E-mail / anti-virus
* Firewalls
"There were two essential goals for our primary design, firstly to ensure robust LAN infrastructures at both branches for Mac and PC users, which is pretty much the easy part," says Riaan du Toit, chief Windows Server Engineer for the Crystal River Corporation. "And secondly, to ensure the inter-branch Diginet could handle the volumes and file sizes from a business time perspective. That`s much harder."
"The file sizes and SQL queries that these advertisers deal with are enormous and constant even across their WAN. Ensuring 24/7 up-time is a standard expectation - but how do you fit all that data into a relatively small Telkom Diginet pipe and still expect to be working in business time?"
Doron Shmaryau picks up the chase; he is the Crystal River Cisco and Peribit engineer. "This is the perfect job for the Peribit SM500 Sequence Mirror. We `melt` these appliances into the infrastructure. The client has no idea that they are there. But, to give you an idea, they [the SM500s] take the data and shrink it and then they only pass the differences on.
"So for example, if the Cape Town branch sends a 10Mb file to Johannesburg, the system will compress it and send it over. But the next time the file is sent only the compressed differences will be sent. This results in a staggering increase in bandwidth. At the moment the SM500s are producing over 11x the bandwidth. That`s 11 times. Remember, the users have no idea that the SM500s are even there. It is built in to the infrastructure and works transparently in the background," says Du Toit.
"The latest feature of the SM-series is that it is protocol-aware. It recognises HTTP, SQL, CIFS (Microsoft protocol) and EXCHANGE (among others) and optimises them to provide even faster and leaner connections.
"Okay so you have all the bandwidth, but a virus outbreak or a rogue user with a P2P application like KAZAA can kill your environment. The quality of service (QOS) built in to the Peribit is dynamic and ensures maximum utilisation of available bandwidth for business use as defined by Jupiter`s dynamic protocol usage. We can dynamically allocate business bandwidth on-the-fly so that, for example, huge e-mail messages do not interrupt business and voice applications. This is, perhaps, more important that the bandwidth itself."
"It`s amazing, but if we switch the Peribits off, our Johannesburg branch for all intents and purposes is offline," says Moira Dorfman, IT manager and project co-ordinator for The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town).
"Forget about everything you`ve heard though, the real power in this solution was the fact that the Crystal River Corporation team worked with us like their lives depended on it. I felt comfortable and confident throughout the entire roll-out. And that sentiment never wavered for a second. Remember these guys recommended, built and deployed our entire infrastructure, from the servers right down to the cabling. And they managed it right through. They are truly professional experts and I would love other companies to experience this level of service," says Dorfman.
"This kind of service is only possible if you have a team that is dedicated and passionate about the work they do. It`s only possible if you don`t have to rely on other outsource companies. That is why Crystal River has all its own in-house skills and expertise that cover all operating systems and hardware. From Mac, Unix, Novell to Microsoft to Cisco. You can only provide this level of solution if everyone on the team is from the same team. You cannot just do this without intimate knowledge of how these intricate assemblies are supposed to work together," says Stephen Abraham, MD of Crystal River.
"We often come across networks that have been installed and supported by JSE-listed IT companies, where very little thought or care was taken in the solution design and deployment. Because they are big, corporates seem to trust them too easily, but they often give us the impression they actually have very little working knowledge of what they were doing. Let`s hope that`s not the case!"
Crystal River Corporation - We love IT.
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