Remote sites in Botswana pose no problems to arivia.kom

The Botswana Ministry of Agriculture and Ariel Technologies Botswana, the regional office of arivia.kom, have signed off phase two of the Ministry of Agriculture Infrastructure Project.

The project is worth R5.9 million, and phase two, stage one, which is now completed, included the provision, design, supply and implementation of infrastructure to 250 users in Gaborone and remote sites in southern and western Botswana. This was achieved by mid-January 2003 - six weeks ahead of schedule and well within the contract cost.

The 32 sites serviced ranged from Gaborone to Ghantsi which is some 700km away from Gaborone. The infrastructure capability provided included cabling and networking services, remote services, e-mail facilities, office automation, anti-virus installation, and the configuration of hardware and software. In all, 15km of UTP cabling and 5km of fibre optic fibre were installed.

The Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr MV Raborokgwe, noted that the implementation was successful and felt that the ministry will put this technology to good use and reap the benefits of improved service delivery. He added that further IT training is needed to ensure the continued success of this project.

Steve Oliver, the Ariel Technologies Botswana regional manager, noted that despite all the challenges the project was successfully completed within budget and time requirements. He expressed his satisfaction with the level of co-operation received from the ministry throughout the project.

Using an innovative approach, arivia.kom managed to contain the costs of server infrastructure without sacrificing the need to remotely manage the networks. This was achieved by applying backup software management modules to three levels of servers and the use of the Windows 2000 active directory. The main server at Gaborone interfaces with three site servers which are linked with smaller servers located at remote sites. Arivia.kom also ensured that the switches, network and backup processes could be managed remotely. The ability to remotely manage geographically dispersed sites from Gaborone obviates the need to deploy experts in remote areas.

Reliability remains a key feature of this project and the Gaborone site was provided with clustered e-mail servers to ensure total uptime. Basie Beyers, the project manager from arivia.kom`s Infrastructure Business division, adds: "We deployed a backup strategy using tape libraries capable of backing up six terabyte of data in the minister of agriculture head office and all remote site servers. This approach enables any lost data to be restored and is also designed for extending this facility to other remote sites at a later stage."

Beyers notes another key benefit to the client: "Managers will be able to access their mail and data from different remote offices anywhere in Botswana where our infrastructure has been deployed."

Arivia.kom utilised local expertise where possible and assigned the cabling work and the first line support services to Botswana-based companies while local trainers undertook the IT-related training of the Ministry of Agriculture staff.