Role:

Infrastructure Architect for the Applications Rehosting (Data Centre relocation) workstream, as part of the separation of the Telecoms Division (Talk Talk Group) from Carphone Retail.

Responsible for defining the high level infrastructure strategies for the physical and logical separation of the shared services used by Talk Talk Group within Carphone Retail to a new dedicated Data Centre.

Key Achievements:

Responsible for proposing strategic group wide initiatives for the implementation of corporate Microsoft services including MS Active Directory 2003, MS Exchange 2007, MS Sharepoint 2007 and Call Centre Agent Desktops running on a clustered VMWare 3i architecture with site level Disaster Recovery.

The Separation Programme was given the objective of establishing TalkTalk Group technology independence from CPW Retail and the CPW IT department. The design proposed implementing a new Microsoft Active Directory/Exchange environment, new agent desktop and a new corporate telephony solution, delivered over an independent network, thus allowing a move of legacy TalkTalk staff into the newly formed TTG organisation.

Delivered high level Infrastructure Design proposals for the relocation and rehosting of key business systems to a dual site, DR capable dedicated Data Centres, focusing on reducing costs and providing enhanced service levels.

The relocation and rehosting of TTG applications away from the central CPW IT service was a critical part of the separation programme. The Infrastructure Design was based on a number of key initiatives, primarily, the reuse and enhancement of existing TTG hardware and secondly on the delivery of a new TTG Corporate Microsoft stack of Exchange 2007, Active Directory 2003 and Sharepoint 2007 services running on virtualised VMWare infrastructure.

The designs focused on the ability to utilise and expand the existing site level HDS storage replication services between data centres and added the flexibility provided by VMWare vMotion to provide enhanced levels of service availability.

Produced high level Infrastructure Design proposals for MIS and Data Warehouse separation activities utilising existing investment both hardware and software.

CPW has significant investment in MIS and Data Warehouse technologies from Netezza, Oracle Informatica and Business Objects. Separation of the MIS/DW systems required significant analysis into the products, their lifecycles, the licensing and the applications that utilise them. The design proposals offered TTG/CPW significant improvements over the existing infrastructure by replacing older hardware with newer more cost effective equivalents, enabling both organisations to benefit from greater performance, but at a reduced cost.

Led Infrastructure Design review and produced Infrastructure Design proposal for new TTG only Business Object XI implementation and subsequent migration of TTG universes/reports from the shared BO 6.5 environments.

The main core CPW BO environment was at version 6.5, however, other parts of the TTG business were already running at version XI. A detailed analysis into the current environments and the data sources was undertaken and proposed designs put forward to implement a new environment which included migration of existing 6.5 and XI installations into a fully unified TTG only XI platform with Production, Test and Development environments. The solution took into account the current and proposed data sources and feeds which were proposed to be moved or replicated as part of the MIS/DW separation.

Significant involvement in the production and presentation of business cases to the programme board for the solutions and costs for the proposed Data Centre relocation and separation activities.

As well as documenting the Infrastructure Designs, high level solution designs and costs had to be developed to ensure programme and board level acceptance of the proposed designs. The challenge was to present ideas and solutions to non technical senior directors and business owners, showing how the service will change, but still provide the same level of operational capability currently being received. Also key, was the deep examination into all costs being proposed.

Engaged with group wide departments and 3rd party companies to provide detailed costing and resource estimates.

To ensure all costs were as accurate as possible for the proposed designs and programme cost, significant work was undertaken with internal CPW and TTG teams as well as 3rd party software and hardware providers to bottom out all costs for the infrastructure proposals.

Core Infrastructure:

• Hardware:

  IBM, HP, Sun servers, HDS Storage, Netezza Storage, Cisco Networking.

• OS:

  Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, RedHat Linux, Windows Server, VMWare 3i.

• Software:

  Oracle 10i Database, Informatica, VMWare VDI, Tibco Messaging, MS Exchange, Singl.eView Billing, Business Objects

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Tags: Contract Infrastructure Architect

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 14:18 and is filed under Contract Roles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.