Hardware Upgrade Project George Palios

Contents Outlines the activities undertaken to upgrade the hardware for the Revenues, Benefits and NNDR Systems. The existing servers were running slow due to being overloaded with Additional Databases together with a number of test databases. An imminent compulsory Oracle 10g upgrade would not fit onto the existing configuration. My role was to perform an analysis of the current servers and design and Project Manage a migration of the systems to new hardware. This was a particularly exciting (and high pressure) Project as the implementation had to be successful in a very short timescale due to 56,000 Council Tax bills needing to be produced immediately afterwards. An immensely Challenging and rewarding project.

1.Review operational issues 2.Present Upgrade Options 3.New Hardware Architecture 4. Devise Implementation Plan 5.Go Live (Detailed transition) Aims of Project

Existing Operational Issues Database server heavily overloaded as a result processes ran slowly at peak times.

As the servers could not be further upgraded, hardware was required. Option 1 Purchase new Sun Solaris/Oracle platform Current platform was Sun Solaris/Oracle; The Software Supplier had more experience with supporting their product on the Unix platform. Option 2 Purchase new Microsoft SQL platform hardware Halton I.T. had experience of Microsoft platforms and the majority of services were run on Microsoft with SQL Server databases. Cost of servers much cheaper. Provide and recommend options Decision: Although the Microsoft solution was in the region of 24K and the Unix solution was £66K, the Project Team felt that since response times and support was a priority, the Unix solution was chosen.

New Hardware Architecture Maximizing resources: 2 new servers were commissioned; the old DB server was re-used as an archive server for reports and legacy databases. One server was decommissioned.

Due to the short timescale – 5 weeks (starting at Christmas) A simplified Plan was devised: 1.Purchase and order Equipment 2.Commission Equipment 3.Migrate Databases to new hardware 4. Acceptance Test 5.Go Live (by 9 th February) Implementation Plan

Go Live Plan

The suppliers delivered and commissioned the Hardware and performed the Migration of the Live data to the new Live server. The Database Administration Team then performed Technical Acceptance Testing. User clients then had a week of intensive User Acceptance Testing. Simultaneously, the DBA Team migrated the Live data to the new Test server and performed intensive Technical Acceptance Testing and prepared for Year End Billing. Once all testing had been signed off a final migration cut was taken and the databases were migrated across to the new Live server. Interfaces were also switched to point at the new Live server. Contrary to the diagram, a late decision was made to keep the old live server operational for an extended period of parallel running as a contingency. Go Live Plan Details