Customer InTheSpotlight:  UHY Haines Norton
Improving performance with enhanced infrastructure


UHY Haines Norton is a Chartered Accountancy & Consultancy firm that delivers integrated solutions for all types of organisations and individuals. UHY Haines Norton is a member of UHY, an international association of independent accounting and consultancy firms in more than 50 countries worldwide.

The Sydney office of UHY Haines Norton has been a customer of Professional Advantage's IWI team - formerly Technology Services Division- for more than ten years. Most of this time Professional Advantage has been their preferred IT infrastructure & support partner.

ISSUES

 The company was experiencing various downtime issues with their older core infrastructure. These issues included:

  • Server hardware failures resulting in database corruptions
  • Antivirus software conflicts causing performance issues.
  • The loss of critical systems impacted on user productivity such that UHY estimated each downtime episode to cost them in the region of a $50k per day ‘loss’.

As UHY Haines Norton was about to invest in a new ‘front-end’ Citrix environment to provide centralised published applications, Professional Advantage highlighted the need to stabilise their core ‘back-end’ infrastructure and implement highly available systems.

We recommended systems such as SQL Server and File Servers -which will be ‘available’ in a Microsoft Cluster in less than 1 minute - and Exchange, Active Directory and ISA that will be available within the VMware ESX environment in less than 10 minutes.

SOLUTION
 
 A number of options were discussed and scoped with the end goal to reduce system downtime to less than 10 minutes.

The final decision was to combine both projects into one – both the "front- end" Citrix project and "back end" high availability project for the core infrastructure - as together they provided significantly reduced downtime, improved performance, scalability for growth and enhanced security for their environment.

The following products were implemented by UHY Haines Norton:

  • HP Servers & SAN technology
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (for Clustering)
  • Citrix Presentation Server
  • VMware ESX 3.0 Enterprise
  • Cisco network equipment

PRIMARY BENEFITS RECEIVED

  • Reduction of System downtime to less than 10 minutes
  • Eliminate approximate cost of 50K per day downtime
  • The solutions offered by Professional Advantage have provided considerable infrastructure enhancements that constitute a solid platform for business growth
  • The next stages in the project include discussions on other avenues for the business such as Business Intelligence and remote systems monitoring

For more information on Professional Advantage's Information Worker Infrastructure team click here or to visit UHY Haines Norton's website click here.