Case Studies

IBM Canada – Data Centre Management

Over a 6-year engagement, IBM engaged Tri-Paragon for senior consultants to manage the day-to-day activities of a national telecommunications carrier’s 5 data centre locations. Major activities included:

Working closely with the facility personnel at all sites.
Ensuring all documentation was up to date (elevation diagrams and inventory).
Assigning placement of all new hardware installations.
Managing and approving all vendor cabling.
Designing methods of consolidation.
Managing all internal data centre moves.

Non-Production Data Centre Relocation

Tri-Paragon was engaged to design and mange the move of an IBM client’s 10,000 sq.ft. non-production data centre. We managed the complete end-to-end move, which involved 78 full server cabinets consisting of over 400 physical servers, 2 large virtual backup environments, as well as 42 storage and converged infrastructure cabinets. Key planning, activities and outcomes:

Obtain the current-state configurations of all servers to be moved, network cabling, and power requirements from the source locations.
Design the floor layout of the newly-built target location for all hardware, including network infrastructure, network cabling, and power cabling requirements.
Develop a logistics – transportation plan taking into consideration the 250km distance between the source and target locations.
Identify all risks that may affect the move and develop mitigations.
Work through the “move plan” with all applications owners and system administrators.
During the actual move, once everything was shut down, specialized teams disconnected all the cabinets in a pre-planned move sequence.
Once disconnected, cabinets were moved to the loading dock, loaded onto the moving truck, and once loading was completed, the truck would leave for the target location.
Five trucks were used and rotated to complete 21 loads.
As each truck arrived at the target location, they were unloaded and the hardware was taken to the raised floor, placed in the preplanned locations and cabled.
From the initial start, the first servers were brought online in 2 days and everything was up and running within 6 days (additional time was given for validation).
Over 300 people played a part in this successful data centre relocation – no unplanned outages were encountered.

QA / Test Environment & Infrastructure Relocation

IBM’s client wanted to move their major QA / Test environment out of their primary production data center to their non-production / DR data centre. Tri-Paragon was engaged to manage the overall move – key challenges and considerations:

Duration provided by the client from when the move was approved until the move had to take place was only 35 days.
The environment was only available to be offline at a specific time in the year, and if it wasn’t moved then, it could not be moved for another year and again, at a specific time in the year.
The move consisted of 144 physical servers and 26Tb of data. To complete this within the designated time constraint – key activities included:
Obtain the current-state of all servers to be moved, including network cabling and power requirements from the source location.
Develop a logistics – transportation plan.
Identify all risks that may affect the move and develop mitigations.

Work through the move plan with all application owners and system administrators.
Conduct the physical move during the client’s approved week – the move was completed successfully.
Several challenges were encountered with the storage migration which required a new approach to be identified and applied.
Even with the challenges, the overall move and migration was completed in the timeframe allotted and to the client’s satisfaction.

New Data Centre Planning

Challenge 1 – IBM’s client required additional space urgently to house rapidly growing footprint and new production applications. Tri-Paragon’s consultants managed the overall build in a new IBM Tier 3+ facility, which included:

Planning and designing the floor layout for initial build of 50 server cabinets plus storage.
Ordering all cabinetry and working with architects to order various hardware (AIX, Windows and Storage).
Working with the client on network architecture and hardware requirements.
Working with the cabling vendor on requirements and design.
Infrastructure build and installation of server cabinets, power and network cabling.
Finalize infrastructure build, including network hardware installation and test.
Storage installation and initial build completion – once these steps were completed, the facility was turned over to the client to utilize.
A second build subsequently took place at this facility for an additional 30 server cabinets – also managed by Tri-Paragon’s consultants.

Challenge 2 – IBM’s client had moved into a new IBM data centre from another location but required an additional 5,000 sq.ft. to be prepared for use. Tri-Paragon’s consultants were engaged to manage this requirement, which the build consisted of:

Planning and designing the floor layout for initial build of 50 server cabinets plus storage.
Ordering all cabinetry and working with architects to order various hardware (AIX, Windows and Storage).
Working with the client on network architecture and hardware requirements.
Working with the cabling vendor on requirements and design.
Infrastructure build and installation of server cabinets, power and network cabling.
Network hardware installation and test.
Once the infrastructure was in place, it was turned over to the client.

Hybrid Data Centre Relocation

IBM’s client needed to move their 5,000 sq.ft. data centre from an outsourced location to a newly built IBM data centre. Tri-Paragon was engaged to manage this move and after a complete inventory was taken, it was determined that there were some production applications running at the client’s current site.

Tri-Paragon allocated two consultants for the move; one consultant to manage the production move to a production designated data centre and another consultant to manage the non-production / DR move, requiring precise planning:

All production systems had to be moved first:

20 production applications on 124 servers – these were migrated and/or moved over a 6-week period on weekends during allotted outages – some applications were migrated from one site to the other.
The receiving environments had to be built first, then working with the systems and storage administrators and application owners, the migrations were planned and executed.
A similar method was used for the physical moves, which required additional teams, such as a cabling vendor and movers.
While the production migrations and moves were taking place, the non-production / DR move was being planned.

Subsequently, moves toward the non-production and DR systems proceeded, which included 58 server cabinets (~ 300 physical servers), 19 storage device cabinets, and the complete network infrastructure – steps included:

Obtaining current-state information of all servers to be moved, including network cabling and power requirements from the source location.
Designing the floor layout of the newly-built data centre – location for all hardware, including network infrastructure, network cabling and power cabling requirements.
Developing logistics – transportation plan.
Identifying all risks that may affect the move and develop mitigations.
Working through the move plan with all application owners and system administrators.
Pre-building all network head-ends and installing all fibre cabling under the raised floor.
During the actual move, once everything was shut down, specialized teams disconnected all the cabinets in a pre-planned sequence.
Once disconnected, cabinets were moved to the loading dock, loaded onto moving trucks, and once loading was completed, the truck left for the target location.
Two trucks were used and rotated to complete a total of 16 loads.
As each truck arrived to the target location, they were unloaded and the hardware was taken to the raised floor, then placed in the preplanned locations and cabled.
From the initial start, the first servers were brought online in 2 days and everything was up and running within 3 days.
Additional time was given for validation which took another 2 days.
Total duration from the start of shut down until turned over to the users was 5 days.
240 people played a key role in this very successful hybrid data centre move.

Development Data Centre Relocation

IBM’s client required urgent power relief from its production data centre. A decision was made to move a major development environment from the production data centre to an IBM data centre. Tri-Paragon was engaged to fulfill this requirement and prior to the move – a new build was required, which was accomplished as follows:

Planning and designing the floor layout for initial build of 30 server cabinets plus storage.
Ordering all cabinetry and working with the client on network architecture and hardware requirements.
Working with the cabling vendor on requirements and design, as well as specifics on the move.
Infrastructure build and installation of server cabinets, power and network cabling.
Network infrastructure build, including network hardware installation and test.
Once the infrastructure was in place, it was turned over to the client.
The move took place over 3 weekends and each move consisted of ~ 80 servers.
Data was pre-migrated and applications and servers were shut down.
Servers were unracked, moved and re-racked at the target location, then re-attached to storage and validated.

Structured Cabling, Digital AV, and Network Infrastructure Services 1

Upon completion of the 3rd weekend, the client director of the development environment at a management status meeting said, “the moves were totally transparent to the end users”.

Data Centre Decommission

Over a 6-year engagement with IBM, Tri-Paragon was engaged to provide additional services for decommissioning 4 data centres – this process included:

Conducting a complete audit and recording all equipment – devices.
Removing all network cabling and cabinets.
Removing all head-end infrastructure.
Removing all power WIPs from under the raised floor.

Additionally, Tri-Paragon was engaged by a financial software firm to provide audit and destruction services (ITAD) for servers, network devices, firewalls and storage.

All devices, once audited and recorded, were destroyed in compliance with NAID standards and the client was provided with the resulting audit reports and certificates.

Server Operating System Migration (Client wishes to remain anonymous)

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 were approaching their software end-of-life (EOL) support. This meant that as of January 2020 there would be no free security updates on-premises, including nonsecurity updates, free support options, and no online technical content updates.

As a result, our client for whom we manage all their data centre transactions (adds, moves, changes, deletes and cable plant) requested Tri-Paragon to manage the migration from Windows 2008 / 2008 R2 to Windows 2016 or 2019, which comprised of various considerations:

Before proceeding, Tri-Paragon had conducted an in-depth assessment which concluded that 40% of the client’s Windows servers were no longer required.
These servers were included in the overall Server Operating System Migration Plan for decommissioning by the end of the year subsequent to the migration.
Also as part of the assessment, we confirmed that several applications were unable to run on Windows 2016 or 2019 without major changes to these applications.
Alternate considerations for these applications concluded they could run on Windows 2012 by doing in-place updates to the operating system using various Microsoft utilities.
And for all other applications moving either to Window 2016 or 2019, new VMs were built, applications were successfully migrated and upgraded where necessary.

Data Centre Migrations & Moves / Relocations (Client wishes to remain anonymous)

A financial investment company engaged Tri-Paragon to manage a move – relocation of all servers and storage from 2 existing data centres into to 2 new data centres, which included the following:

Planning, managing, and executing 19 virtual migrations to a converged infrastructure, as well as the physical server and storage moves.
These migrations – moves / relocations comprised of all environments, including disaster recovery, development, user acceptance, and a critical production environment.
Once the migrations and moves were completed, Tri-Paragon was appointed the overall responsibility to decommission the 2 existing data centres.
Prior to proceeding with the decommission activities, audits were conducted, results recorded, and detailed plans developed for execution.
All remaining equipment was shut down, destruction services (ITAD) were performed, and all hardware was removed, including cabling and cabinets.
The work was completed within budget and on schedule without incident.

Data Centre Consolidation (Client wishes to remain anonymous)

One of the most difficult projects that faces an information technology (IT) department is the consolidation of 2 or more data centres. Often the scope of such a project is tremendous and crosses many boundaries of expertise. Lack of planning, extended time frames, and budget overruns challenge many mainframe data centre consolidations.

Tri-Paragon was engaged by a financial services software vendor to manage the consolidation of 2 of their mainframe data centres. Primary advantages and benefits with Tri-Paragon include:
Combined years of mainframe experience available within our vast knowledge-base.
Our ability to provide continuous support before, during and after the consolidation process.
Utilizing our knowledge-base and defined methodologies, we quickly identify key risk areas and their mitigation strategies.
We also have the project planning tools and experience to further enhance detailed planning efforts.
Tri-Paragon assesses and offers various approaches to assist with the selection of the most suitable approach in collaboration with the client.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Program Initiatives

Due to the Anti-Money Laundering legislation that went into effect globally after the 9/11 attacks, all major Canadian financial and non-financial institutions were required to implement a combination of processes, specialized technology solutions, including the use of various services and tools to ascertain a customer’s identify and monitor transactions for suspicious activity.

Tri-Paragon was engaged by one of the major Canadian financial institutions to provide program management services for a multi-year, enterprise-wide AML program initiative. Considerations and scope of work included:

Considerations:

Protect again operational and reputational risk and losses.
Comply with regulators.
Mitigate acts of money laundering and terrorist financing by monitoring persons of interest.
Monitor transaction behaviour through technology solutions.
Report to FINTRAC of all alerts generated through the monitoring activities.

Scope of work:

Identified all resource requirements and secured required resources.
Secured engagement with software vendor and internal / external stakeholders.
Established working and steering committees.
Assessed budget and contingency requirements and obtained funding approvals.
Established detailed plans – schedules, including software vendor plans.
All objectives were met and deliverables were successfully completed – within budget and on schedule with a very positive outcome.

St. Joseph’s Healthcare (SJHC) / London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC)

SJHC / LHSC created an Integrated Content Library (ICL) solution utilizing Stellent’s comprehensive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) product suite for use throughout the executive levels of their regional healthcare network. It had been so successful that expansion to many other departments were planned.

Tri-Paragon was engaged for the ICL expansion plan and to provide specific services consisting of project management and implementation of the most current version of Stellent’s Content Manager product suite, including iterative knowledge transfer and post implementation support.

All services delivered by Tri-Paragon were successfully completed with a very positive and purposeful outcome.

University Health Network (UHN)

University Health Network in Toronto has been utilizing Stellent’s content management product solutions for several years, primarily for linking PDF content to the intranet and public internet sites. Tri-Paragon was engaged to provide consulting services for assessment and alignment of UHN’s objectives, including project oversight and delivery of various enhancements, knowledge transfer and post implementation support.

Acquisition of Stellent by Oracle:

In December 2006, Oracle acquired Stellent, Inc., a global provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software solutions.
Stellent’s best-of-breed ECM solutions encompass document and records management, web content management, digital asset management, imaging and business process management, including risk and compliance.
Stellent’s products are rated as a leader by independent technology analyst firms, including Gartner Group, Forrester Research, and IDC.
Stellent has won a number of awards from leading technology and developer publications.
Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent compliments and extends Oracle’s existing content management portfolio and platform.
The combination of Oracle and Stellent offers customers secure, reliable and highly scalable content management solutions that meet the day-to-day needs of all users across the enterprise while also delivering sophisticated ECM capabilities to professional users.

Hydro One – Capgemini

Tri-Paragon was engaged by Capgemini to manage a major Hydro One program to move legacy servers and VMs off old end of life hardware to a new converged infrastructure hardware platform, which comprised of:

Two major components:

Managing the acquisition and build of 2 converged infrastructure environments at 2 data centres.
Managing the design and architecture of the migration method and approach to be used to migrate all legacy servers to the new converged infrastructure platform.

Challenges and outcome:

This program was plagued out the gate – with delays in hardware delivery from the vendor on continuous change requests from the client.
Another key factor that affected timelines were concurrent application upgrades that were taking place which required spontaneous intertwining into the timelines of this program.
Tri-Paragon managed all these challenges, completed the infrastructure build at both data centres, and developed an in-depth plan to complete all migrations.
The migration plan was approved and turned over to the migration team to execute.

Enbridge Consumers Gas (Enbridge Inc.)

Tri-Paragon was engaged to provide consulting services as the Corporate Year 2000 (Y2K) program manager for Enbridge Consumers Gas and its wholly owned subsidiaries (as of 1998); St. Lawrence Gas Company Inc., Niagara Gas Transmission Limited, Consumersfirst Ltd. (now Enbridge Home Services), JP Haynes Inc., Cornwall Electric, and Enbridge Pennsylvania Inc.

Technology Assets:

The overall corporate Y2K inventory was comprised of ~ 4,000 unique technology assets for assessment, remediation and preparedness.
The technology assets inventory was comprised of IT infrastructure technology, business applications, systems software and technology, network technology, gas distribution technology, various field technology, and large appliances.

Program Structure:

The corporate Y2K program was officially launched in March 1998 – substantially later than the financial services industry, as well as other essential service organizations.
Eight program teams were structured to facilitate the execution of the Y2K program for Enbridge Consumers Gas and its wholly owned subsidiaries.
The program teams comprised of 150 dedicated resources and at peak times, upwards of ~ 250 resources.
Selected vendors were engaged to perform automated code remediation of the business applications.
Projects were divided into critical and non-critical (high, medium and low) priority projects, with a total of 110 critical projects and ~ 175 non-critical projects.

“Tri-Paragon was instrumental in making the Y2K Program for us and several other Enbridge Energy Distribution companies an unequivocal success.” Terry Pasher, Director – Corporate Y2K Program

“Tri-Paragon’s allocated resource demonstrated our ability to manage a large, extremely complex program by employing some very commendable strengths and attributes – organizational skills, thoroughness, dedication, flexibility and patience. A job well done!” Dwight A. Willet, General Manager and VP – Information Technology

Ricoh Canada Inc.

Tri-Paragon was engaged to provide program management and IT services for a number of initiatives based on Ricoh’s strategic direction to improve their office automation objectives and client offerings, which comprised of:

ERP:

Managed the end-to-end implementation of a significant ERP system.
Major customizations were required before the ERP system could be released to production for Ricoh’s day-to-day operations.
It was successfully completed and within the budget and schedule constraints.

Sales Automation:

Ricoh required a solution to automate their sales process – at the time, the existing process required upwards of 17 forms to be filled out manually when Ricoh’s sales team was conducting their standard sales cycle for its customers.
Tri-Paragon was engaged to plan, manage, execute and deliver a web-based sales automation solution, nation-wide to Ricoh’s sales team, with the ability to enter orders online via the internet and/or intranet using electronic forms.

Key objectives of this initiative were to eliminate manual processes, redundancy of the same hand-written content on the various forms, errors and time to process by introducing a transaction-based solution with business rules and integrated workflows.
Tri-Paragon was responsible to confirm and finalize business requirements, determine project approach, including technical and application architecture direction, and overall integration and security strategy with Ricoh’s key operational systems; Baan ERP, Pricing (MAPP), and Enterprise Portal.
The Sales Automation initiative was extremely successful and achieved all objectives by automating the old methods of manual processing of all sales related hand-written forms, which included various lease contracts, trade-up / buy-out requests, equipment demo, removal and relocation requests, service loaner and exchange requests, delivery and installation receipts, etc.
Tri-Paragon continued to be engaged by Ricoh for ongoing support, planning – execution of new change requests, and various other initiatives.

Portal:

Ricoh wanted to be “easier to do business with” for their customers.
Tri-Paragon sourced and implemented a world-leading enterprise portal solution that enabled customers to view service orders, service history, contract details, sales orders – amongst various other content.
Each portal requirement and solution for Ricoh were completely customized to take on Ricoh’s customer-specific “look and feel” as if it was their own.

Infrastructure:

Ricoh had hardware in multiple locations, including an unreliable and unstable national network, which needed to be addressed to mitigate business interruption.
Tri-Paragon managed a major corporate office move and a data centre merge – consolidation.
It was a major undertaking in that it involved all aspects of an office move, such as; construction, wiring, floor plans, ordering furniture, etc.
Over 250 employees were moved from 4 office locations throughout the greater Toronto area, including moving multiple branch locations.
The data centre merge involved moving equipment from 3 different locations to Ricoh’s new corporate office building that also housed their Tier 2 data centre.
Tri-Paragon also researched various network solutions for consideration to address Ricoh’s national network.
We concluded with moving Ricoh to fibre across the country, saving money and considerably improving reliability and performance.

Global Print Solution:

Ricoh had a requirement to supply their global customers with a “print on demand” solution for invoicing and statements.
Tri-Paragon was engaged to design, develop and implement a global solution for outsourced “print on demand” end-to-end capabilities.
The “print on demand” solution functionality was architected to securely receive data and documents from 11 different countries to a central location for processing.
At the central processing location, the data and documents were stored by location and then processed daily which involved creation of forms, populating the forms with the stored data and merging the forms with other documents received.
The final step of the “print on demand” solution process was to transfer the documents to 4 different print facilities (1 in North America and 3 in Europe) for printing and distribution.

Ricoh Document Management (RDM – acquired by AIIM)

Tri-Paragon was initially engaged by RDM to optimize its Stellent Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution and to develop an upgraded Order Management System (OMS).

Eventually, Tri-Paragon became a key RDM partner to create internal solutions and to also implement external Content Management solutions that reflected customer-specific requirements, including customizing the Stellent ECM interface to adopt the customers “look and feel”. Key initiatives:

Order Management System (OMS):

Tri-Paragon utilized Stellent’s ECM product suite and tools to design, develop and implement online – remote, web-based customer-specific OMS solutions which enabled RDM’s customers to manage and maintain their own content (documents, forms, books, stationary, etc.).
The web-based OMS solutions were integrated with both the Content Management system and RDM’s ERP Manufacturing system, which enabled:
RDM’s customers to log into their designated web site to manage their own group of users, manage their own content, and to subsequently place an order request by user for printing.
The new OMS solution simplified the document ordering and printing process for RDM’s customers and also streamlined RDM’s back-end processes.

Variable Print on Demand:

RDM had a desire to enable customers, such as; universities and colleges, and professors and students with functionality to upload documents, select material and binding solutions, including printing, either locally or at RDM’s facility.
Tri-Paragon created a web-based application solution that enabled the end-user to upload a document, select the type of paper, colour of paper, inserts (if required), covers, method of binding (if required), and number of copies, and then submit their request for printing.
Additionally, online inquiries were created that followed the manufacturing process for print and shipping (if necessary).

York Region District School Board (YRDSB)

York Region District School Board had been utilizing a much older and unsupported version of Stellent’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution which needed a major upgrade, including various enhancements.

Tri-Paragon was engaged to assess the current-state ECM solution and conduct requirements planning, including providing project estimates and presenting a Services Proposal.
Once approved, we proceeded with the project management, upgrade, conversion and enhancement activities, including providing post implementation support.

United Way of Greater Toronto

Tri-Paragon was engaged to conduct a vendor evaluation, vendor recommendation, assessment of hardware and infrastructure environments to meet capacity and performance requirements, including provision of a final report on findings and recommendations.

United Way of Greater Toronto was pleased with the findings and recommendations presented by Tri-Paragon, and informed on their satisfaction as follows:

“Thanks for all your advice and assistance on our systems issues … we are moving ahead, in large part due to the help you have provided.” Anne Gordon, President

Sony of Canada

Sony of Canada required Stellent’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to be integrated with their SAP ERP system. Tri-Paragon was engaged to design, develop and implement a comprehensive solution – comprised of:

Extract invoice / statement related data from SAP to build a temporary file with required metadata fields.
Process the temporary files through Stellent’s Batch Loader and check content into Content Server.
Push PDF invoices to the extranet site through Content Publisher scheduler.
Send an email after the daily batch load to each of their customers with invoice(s) and/or statement attached.

The email attachment solution developed was a unique feature in that if there’s multiple invoices for a given customer in one day – the invoices are merged into one PDF file and then attached to the email for notification and distribution.
Provided capability for single sign-on between multiple web sites (internet, intranet and extranet sites) and Stellent, including synchronization of user account information between these sites.
Suppressed password change in Stellent Content Server (unless administrator) for extranet server (customers).

“Tri-Paragon provided us with professional expertise to accomplish our content management objectives. We fully expect to be calling upon them again to assist us with our many future requirements.” Doug Green, Manager – Business Systems