Case studies

The University of Western Sydney (UWS) has today gone live with a managed Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for its 5000 users.

Sydney based law practice Law Partners Solicitors and Barristers (LPSB), has cleared network congestion and continual downtime by replacing its in-house Microsoft Outlook solution with hosted Exchange Server.

Gold Coast City Council has cut the complexity from network management by dumping its unsupported Novell network authentication software for a new solution.

Belyando Shire Council has replaced its aging work administration platform with a new shared services solution which will coordinate work for its 140 staff.

Employment and consulting agency Australian Recruiting has found refuge with a new anti-spam gateway and firewall solution after its IT network suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack, Trojan horse infections, and plagues of malware.

Highly distributed organsations run their IT systems on a managed services provider (MSP) model -- supporting numbers of offices dispersed over a geographic area. Mark Scott, president of The Utility Company, says the best model for this combines advanced network monitoring with a franchising system, such as that used by Dunkin' Donuts. His company is an MSP serving a growing population of small companies -- "five-person PR firms, 30-person law offices" -- across North America from its Ottawa, Canada, base.

Faced with extremely remote desert locations and a complete lack of network infrastructure across the stark landscape, IT workers with the Nevada Department of Corrections needed to connect 24 prison facilities around the state.

When it comes to flexible enterprise storage, the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine doesn't horse around. Over the last six months, the college has been putting its 7TB storage area network through its paces, using it for nearline backup and primary storage, and has this insight to share: Storage virtualization is the cat's meow.

A perusal of Internet message boards and online forums shows that fan anticipation of seeing characters from popular Japanese superhero-themed cartoons such as Gatchaman and Astro Boy make the 21st century leap to feature-length computer-generated imagery (CGI) films is reaching a fever pitch.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

For the Pan American Health Organization, advanced conferencing technologies are literally a lifesaver.

With wired phones dying off at colleges, IT executives on campus are looking to VOIP and unified communications platforms as ways to meet the needs of students and faculty using wireless devices.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

Microsoft is spending more time soliciting and responding to feedback from users of its Dynamics business applications, according to attendees at the vendor's recent Convergence show in San Diego.

Stefan Thibeault, a programmer at a clothing manufacturer in Montreal, is convinced of the value of using dual PC monitors. Doing so has given him a much larger electronic workspace, eliminated such annoyances as the need to frequently alt-tab between applications and cut down on his trips to the printer.