Break out the Cookie Cutter

In the last 12 months my company has been busy and I "really" mean busy!

We moved our 2 largest corporate offices, merged one branch office, acquired 4 companies in 3 different countries, all while implementing a Global Disaster Recovery project and during those periods the war cry was "Zero downtime, faster integration and on target delivery!"

A mentor once taught me that there is opportunity in chaos, it would have been easy with all this change going on to simply run into a corner and hide but it was also an amazing opportunity to re-architect our core network infrastructure.

Well I'm not one for hiding so I with the help of my team and some trusted partners we set about the task of redesigning our core network infrastructure in order to make it easier to understand and secondly a scalable and re-usable template.

A Re-usable Template? What's that you may say!

We'll here's the thing, linking up and architecting networks for future growth can be a tad difficult. However if you have a standard template in place you can easily replicate the network design somewhere else making it:

• Faster and easier to deploy (I already know what it's going to look like before I've started or been engaged);
• Faster to document (search and replace anyone?) and;
• Requiring minimal knowledge overhead i.e. If I know the Storage Area Network details on one site, I instantly know that it's going to be in a similar range and have the same configuration on another site.

I also know exactly how much a acquisition of a new site will typically cost, the estimated lead time of equipment and resources needed, I and my vendors call this the standard acquisition kit and I can give my vendors the heads up that we'll need one ahead of schedule as soon as we've completed the IT assessment.

With this template we have lowered our integration implementation time of new acquisitions to sub 72 hours and we hope to reduce this down to less than 24 hours in the future, so if your organisation is big into mergers and acquisitions it may be time to breakout the cookie cutter!