Technology Refresh

The Problem

A global company with over 1,500 impacted servers located around the world approached LTI for help in December of 2009. Microsoft’s support of their Windows 2000 Server Operating System was slated to come to an end in July 2010. The company’s servers would no longer receive upgrades or support from Microsoft. As a result, they would be vulnerable to potential attacks and would put other devices on the network at risk. Businesses continuing to rely on these systems would do so without the benefit of security hotfixes, patches or service packs.

The Solution

The LTI team identified the servers and contacted the global owners with our recommendation to upgrade, consolidate or decommission each server.

The Method

An LTI rapid deployment team was assembled to address the need within the compressed timeframe. LTI put together a comprehensive project plan and executed the upgrade strategy, monitoring the entire process throughout the project lifecycle. In addition, the team went “outside the box” and developed a new tracking and reconciliation process that was adopted by the client as a “best practice.”

The Value

The LTI team found that 20% of the servers were either housing outdated legacy systems or small applications, and most could be consolidated to a virtual environment. Not only did the project increase performance, reliability, maintenance and scalability, but it also saved the customer $4.1 million dollars over a 5-year period. By decommissioning and consolidating hundreds of servers, the client avoided future costs for server maintenance, floor space, electricity, Windows licenses and future production support costs associated with those servers.