Extreme Wiring Closet Makeover!

IT wiring closets are places nobody - except the Geeks *cough IT staff go. In reality, they're the nerve center of the physical network that enables computers in an office to talk to each other and provide the services everyone depends on to get their work done. You would expect such an important place would be kept in order and meticulously maintained. Unfortunately, they are places where wiring connections are done quickly since up time is important and rerouting a misplaced cable can mean disconnecting an important network device. Unfortunately wiring closets can end up looking like this:

Time for a Makeover!

Yes, it's embarrassing, but it happens (what does your garage look like right now?) and when it does, you need to just bite the bullet and shut down the entire network and do a wiring make over. What? shut everything down? Yes, disconnecting those cables means the network is either not accessible or the serves which constantly communicate stop talking and need to re sync when reconnected. The TWR IT/IS team decided to kick everyone off at 5pm and redo the cabling. The result was dramatic!

Okay, to some it may still look like a mess of wires, but to us in IT it's a big improvement. What do you think? Now, to tackle that garage.....

TWR's Global Geeks lay out a Plan

Last week, I hosted our global IT/IS meetings. This is where we bring the geeks in our organization together for a week of hashing out future strategy and review how well our global infrastructure is working.

As a nonprofit, our organization benefits from charity pricing on Microsoft Licensing and we have an Enterprise Agreement to license our offices around the world. Needless to say, we’re a Microsoft shop, but we do deploy Open Source technology for niche applications. The discount we get on licenses allows us to stay reasonably current in server and workstation technology.

Here are some of the things I learned from our global team:

1) Windows 7 works great, runs well on existing and new hardware and is a good replacement for XP.

2) Windows 7 in combination with server 2008 R2 provides powerful integration and makes network management much easier.

3) Exchange 2010 should provide us with tighter integration to our SharePoint 2010 environment and allow for more efficient disaster recovery. It also supports non IE Browsers in the Web Access environment.

So our goal is to have Windows 7 on the workstation, Windows 2008 R2 server on the backend (virtualized through VSphere) with an Exchange 2010 email environment and our collaboration environment handled by SharePoint 2010. No, we’re not quite ready to move to the cloud. It’s not yet cost effective and we do have security concerns. Plus we have a global WAN to consider and not all locations have the best internet access.

This step should be good preparation should we move to the cloud in the future, but for now it will give us a robust and integrated environment using the best of breed components available today.

What do you think of our plan?