Working closely with networking company 3Com SA, the KZN Department of Housing has invested in a major upgrade to its computer network, in order to improve the department`s service delivery capacity in the province.
Motivated by the powerful capabilities of new software systems that have the ability to significantly streamline the administration of government housing allocations, the department resolved to upgrade to a high-speed 3Com Gigabit Ethernet solution, which would enable the department to utilise new state-of-the-art geographical information systems (GIS).
By installing a Gigabit backbone and 10/100Mbps links to the department`s 450 workstations, problems that were being experienced on the network (with spiralling workloads, and the handling of large files up to 50Gb) are now a thing of the past, according to Thansen Singh, the department`s Acting Deputy Director: Information Management.
He says the upgrade is already paying dividends as bottlenecks have been eliminated and data flow speeded up considerably.
"The department is handling significantly more business in line with the increased demand for housing in KwaZulu-Natal. The new infrastructure has given us a significant increase in network capacity and performance, and enabled our staff to cope with increasing demands on our housing subsidy system.
"With plans in place for the development and implementation of additional applications, like a Rental Tribunal Case Management System, there will be a natural increase in network traffic, and this situation would not have been manageable without the 3Com network upgrade."
Looking to the future, Singh confirms that the department is placing more emphasis on its GIS system as a decision-making tool for the location of new housing projects.
"The stage has been set for additional developments to be designed to further streamline the housing allocation process in the province," he notes. "For example, we are looking to progress to an e-business-driven, Web-based solution, which will give our developers an opportunity to view GIS and other data online and share information in real-time."
Dion Curtis, the on site SITA LAN Engineer, emphasised that reliability was also a key consideration in the upgrade process. "With the increase in workload, system uptime has become critical. As a result, we have been working with 3Com to ensure that our network is fully fault-tolerant and that we keep our system up-to-date with current technology - particularly from a network management perspective."
Singh added that the upgrade process was achieved with a minimum of disruption to the department. "With 3Com`s assistance, the entire upgrade process was accomplished with hardly any intervention in our day-to-day activities. In fact, throughout the implementation phase we were able to keep our main servers running."
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