Ibero
Neumann Kaffee Gruppe (NKG) is the world's leading green Coffee service group. With 46 companies in 28 countries they have over 2,100 employees worldwide. The Ibero Kenya company required a more manageable office network. The single on-site IT technician was having problems dealing with all of the support requirements for the Kenyan operations. A level of consolidation and rationalization was requested to allow the technician to manage the complete operations with only the occasional support from external consultants.
The solution needed to be based on industry standards and also be replicated to other locations within the region. It was also deployed at Mazao Ltd. in Tanzania. The same IT technical team were given oversight to this operation with local support staff to assist in country. The solution thus must also have remote management and remote support features.
Solution
The solution was based on standard Windows components with a classic client server deployment.
LAN and WAN: The basic infrastructure existed for the LAN and did not need to be adjusted (full 100Mbps switches linking desktops and servers). The WAN used low speed leased lines to provide dedicated Internet access. Using these links a combined Netscreen firewall and VPN, from Juniper Networking, was deployed to provide secure remote access (a requirement for remote management and support). The technician was given basic training on these devices with second line support offered via consultants.
Desktops: Standardized desktop computers and operating systems were utilized to reduce complexity and to allow reployment of equipment to any location within the company's office environment. Using Windows XP Pro the desktops (allowing remote support and access) were configured and joined to an Active Domain for user management. All computers contained a standard desktop environment and application suite.
Servers: New HP Proliant rack based servers were procured, configured and deployed in the environments. The servers were built as domain controllers which also provided file and print servers. Additional servers were deployed to act as application and SQL servers. All of these servers were bound to the domain to allow group policy usage for security and management.
Users: All users were required to login to the computers using a domain account. The domain account used group policies to configure their desktop environment, roaming profiles, share access and user rights on given computers. Since the user's data was stored in their roaming profiles the documents were actually located on the server for redundancy and also to allow a central location for backups.
Other: Standard office hardware, printers, scanners, etc. were not replaced but were added to the environment. In addition to the deployment of the servers (Windows 2003 Server) monitoring software was installed to give a view into the health of the complete environment.
Tags: Windows, Server, Active Directory, Domain, MSSQL, MSSQL Server, SQL, IIS, IIS Server, integration, rollout