Dave Smith Center
Ensuring the Continuity of Care
NeoLore Networks facilitates a successful Distributed File System implementation
Kevin Crawford, operations manager at the Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre, refers to ‘the project’ as “quite a challenge.”
‘The project’ involved establishing a VPN network, data replication, site and server redundancy, and site-to-site connectivity — occurring across a busy, health services environment. The overall objective was to better manage fi le servers and their resources while keeping them available and secure for users. Indeed, it was a significant challenge.
A reliable, top-end disaster-recovery infrastructure.
The Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre (DSYTC), established in 1993, offers alcohol and drug abuse programs designed for youth, with support available for families of youths with addictions. It is the only non-profit group in eastern Ontario dedicated exclusively to helping youth, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. The Centre began by providing assistance to some 120 youth and parents in year one. Today, with a team of over fi fty committed employees, the Centre assists more than 700 people per year. Growth has its rewards — and complexities.
“The original initiative behind the project was to replace or upgrade servers,” says Kevin. “This gave us a great opportunity to establish a more efficient system. We had unconnected servers in three locations, within eighty kilometers of each other.” A reliable, top- end disaster-recovery infrastructure would ensure continuity across their critical services.
“Aside from linking the sites, and establishing new levels of redundancy and fi le access speed, we wanted to set up an Exchange server to connect to Health Canada’s ONE Mail network,” Kevin says, “This was the window to do that as well.”
NeoLore Networks received the call.
The DFS Solution
NeoLore Networks has been supporting DSYTC for over 12 years. “We enjoy an established relationship with NeoLore, so we turned to them,” Kevin explains. “Together, we developed a statement of work — assumptions, risks, contingency plans — and they came back to us with some innovative solutions.”
Neolore Networks based the solution on the Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) — a set of client and server services allowing an organization using Microsoft Windows servers to organize many distributed fi le shares into a distributed fi le system.
DFS helps administrators manage these distributed, remote servers, limiting network traffic over slow WAN connections, maintaining the availability of fi les during WAN outages or server failures, and ensuring that branch servers are backed up correctly. DFS provides location transparency and redundancy to improve data availability in the face of failure or heavy load.
“On budget and on time”
When facing enterprise-wide network challenges, IT groups want a solution that’s reliable, secure, scalable, and transparent. With an organization such as the Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre, optimum IT services can only help ensure the continuation and growth of top-line critical services. As for ‘the project’? “NeoLore really delivered,” Kevin confirms.
“They were on budget and on time. It’s great working with them.”