Cajero

SERVER MIGRATION FOR SPECIALIST MANUFACTURER IN KENT

Cajero is a leading manufacturer of specialist equipment for machining composite components for aviation and automotive companies worldwide.

Akita was invited to review the company’s IT support.

As part of our assessment of Cajero’s IT systems, engineers discovered that previous IT support contractors had not made appropriate recommendations to improve their systems and had left Cajero’s servers in a badly configured state.

A small, under-resourced unit was acting as the company’s main server. It was set up on free server software, inappropriate for this use, and was proving unreliable for the business. In contrast, Cajero had been persuaded to purchase a second much higher specification server which was only being used to run a single manufacturing MRP application. With the clear disparity in this use of hardware, a server migration was the obvious solution.

Akita’s engineers started by upgrading the newer server with additional RAM modules to increase performance. They then created two virtual environments within that server, each running a different disk speed. Using an enterprise solution from VMware, Cajero’s server environment was replicated in the faster of the two new environments, and their content was migrated over. Due to its importance to business operations, the single MRP application was, with the input of the software technical team, transferred to the second virtual environment.

Akita’s engineers coordinated the server migration to take place over a weekend, with an engineer ready onsite on Monday just in case there were any residual issues (there weren’t). This approach ensured that there was no business disruption to Cajero during the migration.

The higher specification server is now being used as the main system server. Full redundancy is now in place, and dual power supplies have been fitted. As the hardware could still be made useful, the old server is being used as a backup and to run Cajero’s legacy MRP software that will not run on newer hardware. Plans have been made to phase this server out in the very near future.

Cajero now has a future-proof, scalable server solution. The split environments and disk speeds mean that day-to-day systems now work faster. The new server software also means that servicing and updates can now take place remotely, which is more convenient to both Cajero and Akita. The new server setup also offers improved power efficiency whereby Cajero benefits from the reduced power demand.