Hardware infrastructure upgrade | Italian Institute of Culture

Italian Institute of Culture

Requirements

From the first discussion with ACROM, the Italian Institute of Culture intended to have some changeover and important upgrade of the IT architecture, both in terms of IT infrastructure, security and licensing. Facing major problems in operating existing IT resources, we proposed an audit that proved it was impossible to keep a high level of security and fluency in our customer’s business.

ACROM Solution

Following the audit, we agreed with the Italian Institute of Culture to have major changes in internal IT architecture, from replacing all the hardware equipment in servers area to migration of operating systems from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server R2, migration of Active Directory group and setup of back-up policies for the new working mode.

Technologies

The old server, which was about 10 years old, was replaced with a new one, with hardware configuration suitable to the beneficiary’s business needs. We chose a Dell T110 server with the following configuration:

  • CPU: Intel Xeon® E3-1220v2 4C/4T 3.1 GHz
  • RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600 UDIMM
  • HDD: 4 x Dell 1TB SATA 7.2k 3.5″ HD
  • Controler RAID: integrated RAID 0/1/5/10 SATA
  • The HDD-s were configured in RAID10.
  • The operating system for the new server was Windows 2012 R2 Essentials.

In order to reduce the impact on users activity, we decided to migrate Active Directory from the old Windows 2003 server to the new server, which helped us minimize the server unavailability period to only 3 hours break.

To simplify data backup, we chose the virtualization technical solution of the server and virtual machine backup made on external HDD connected via USB interface to the physical machine.

Benefits

  • Removal of the risk associated with the use of Windows Server 2003 version, which is no longer supported by Microsoft as of July 2015
  • Removal of risks associated with the use of an IT infrastructure that cannot ensure the desired level of security and performance of the organization
  • Improving methods of making backup

 

Results

Ezio Peraro, Director
As an institute of culture, our needs were and are still very different from other clients or private companies and ACROM company understood how important… [read more]