Although a massive surge of activity in SA's entertainment, travel and tourism sectors will accompany the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup, companies will also have to upgrade their IT systems to be come 'Fifa compliant'.
This is the view of Paul Appalsamy, CEO of Ellis Park World of Sport, who says the changes required to comply with the requirements for 2010 are an onerous task at best. During the past year, the company has relocated its offices, revamped stadium facilities, and substantially upgraded its server infrastructure.
He cites the most notable aspect of the facility upgrade being the installation of a fully redundant fibre-optic ring network, and a communications hub to allow all forms of digital communications to be routed.
Mission critical
Rohil Dayaram, projects manager at Think iT Solutions, says the first phase of the upgrade focused on Ellis Park World of Sport's server infrastructure. This handles the mission critical systems required for running a match day, in addition to the data and applications required for operations in the stadium.
“To minimise disruption, we chose to carry out the server upgrade while the company was moving premises, and successfully provisioned and switched over to the new hardware within seven days,” says Dayaram.
“We migrated from Windows Server 2003 to Server 2008, as well as deploying Microsoft's Forefront security solution,” he explains. “We then oversaw the migration of line business applications from the old environment to the new environment. After four days we had the migration to the point where users were able to log onto the servers and access their information.”
According to Dayaram, over the next three days, Think iT's deployment team finalised the migration, ensuring users can access information in the same way they were able to before, and that user preferences were identical to how they were before the migration.
Hands-on approach
“The familiarity Think iT already had with our IT environment and the insight it had into the plans we had put in place, made it predisposed to assisting us with the upgrade,” says Appalsamy.
He points out that the company conducted numerous meetings every week to check the status of sub-projects, and that the upgrade wouldn't have been successful without this constant involvement.
“Think iT took Ellis Park World of Sport through the entire upgrade, first specifying the equipment and services needed to transform the stadium and its management, and then ensuring suppliers were adequately briefed and capable of carrying out the tasks at hand,” says Dayaram.
Appalsamy adds that Think iT will have staff onsite at every sporting event during the Soccer World Cup. “We look forward to a long-term future relationship,” he concludes.
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