Down's Syndrome Association

www.downs-syndrome.org.uk

Registered Charity dedicated to helping people with Down's syndrome to live full and rewarding lives.

With a branch office in Northern Ireland and their Head Office in London, the Down's Syndrome Association needed to consolidate their fragmented IT infrastructure to improve speed, resilience and functionality.

With separate, disjointed networks in each of their offices, the Down's Syndrome Association had been forced to resort to emailing updated files between offices to ensure that all staff had access to the most current information.

Their existing IT platform was built on a Novell File Server and a Microsoft NT4 Server for their data and internal databases.

The speed of data transfer between offices was paramount to achieving real improvements to operational efficiency, raising concerns over the bottle necks that could restrict performance if branch offices were accessing files over a VPN connection.

Online Support installed Microsoft 2003 R2 Servers at the London Head office and Belfast branch office. The offices were linked via a VPN tunnel using Zywall firewalls. Using Microsoft's DFS Technology (Distributed File System), data is replicated in real time on both servers in each of the offices.

Speed: 

	With identical DFS generated mirror copies of every file maintained on both local servers, the most current information is instantly available across the organisation without delay or version control issues.
	With the DFS technology, only the changes made to a file are transmitted via the internet to be synchronised with the mirror copy on the other local server; minimising the internet bandwidth required, enhancing the speed and delivering a seamless user experience.

Efficiency:    

With a complete and current copy of all data held in the London Head Office, there is no longer a need to a conduct daily back up of the branch office server, saving time and money.

Security: 

With two complete copies of their data held at separate offices, this solution provides additional resilience to the Down's Syndrome Association's disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements. Should one of the local servers require routine maintenance or suffer a failure, users would be automatically redirected to the server in the other office.