SeaView Research Migrates to Microsoft Windows® Server 2003 Family Servers setting up a reliable fault-tolerant base ground for expansion.
Published: April 2007

With the ‘frustration factor’ a thing of the past, reliable technology systems and problem free operations are a reality for SeaView Research network. “We’re delighted with the technology supplied by Microsoft, and are equally delighted with the partner that has solved our issues. Solutions@MBA brings enthusiasm to their work, finding solutions instead of coming to us with problems,” says Bruce Wilner.

Organization Overview
SeaView Research a pharmaceutical testing facility specializing in complete Phase I and early Phase II clinical pharmacology testing for leaders in the pharmaceutical industry needed to expand its platform to conform to its fast growth and other client needs.

Situation
Sea View’s Research Center has 128 beds which are divided into five independent units. The units are designed to facilitate both protocol conduct and participant comfort. Sea View’s self-contained outpatient screening office, located in walking distance from the inpatient facility, permits, high-volume screening without impacting overnight clinic operations. SeaView Research needed to expand its platform to conform to its fast growth and other client needs.

“MS Small Business Server 2000 has served the business very well in the years that we have been using the platform,” said Giovanni Potesta, SeaView’s IT Manager. ”But the business is growing and we needed to improve the infrastructure by creating reliability and redundancy in the systems,” continued Potesta. “Things really came to a head when we were relying on our daily productivity of critical applications running on one main server,” stated Potesta. “We needed to decentralize our core applications and data into several servers in order to produce a fault tolerance environment that would reduce downtime to a minimum,” concluded Potesta.

In addition, SeaView wanted to provide users from their two remote locations a faster performance when running their application across their existing Point-To-Point T1 connections to their main office.

Solution
After considerable research into available options, this pharmaceutical testing facility engaged Solutions@MBA, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to migrate their Microsoft Small Business Server 2000® operating system version–based environment to the full-blown Microsoft Windows® Server 2003 Family Servers.

Solutions@MBA implemented the overall solution-migration and set up a reliable fault tolerant base ground for expansion. Now the company is targeting to add more servers and specialized applications. “Running the technology has gone from being a nightmare to being an absolute pleasure,” declared Potesta “ This is due to the implementation of Windows Software Update Services, and Active directory’s software deployment capabilities, just to mention a few.”

Bruce Wilner, Consultant to SeaView, notes that SeaView Research is a highly specialized business. “The service produced is geared to address the needs of a highly specialized niche in a highly demanding market. The success of this business is dependent upon the ability to communicate effectively with clients, and efficiently accessing our highly specialized database is critical,” emphasized Wilner.

Benefits
Improved Stability. Since deploying Microsoft Windows 2003 Family Servers within the proper hardware configuration, Giovanni Potesta says the company is experiencing almost uninterrupted uptime. “Our marketing database is a relatively small one now—but access to that database is critical, enabling us to have immediate retrieval of important information. With the SQL 2000 replication services in place, the database is available continuously. Furthermore, our network data are also now available all the time” he explains.

From having to reboot the server two to three times a week, they are now in a situation where literally hundreds of days go by without incident due to proper redundant hardware setup. This includes RAID 5 configuration and mirroring drives in combination with Microsoft 2003 services like Directory File System (DFS) and backup DNS servers that provide fail over in case of a problem.

Connectivity is a breeze. Remote users are able to use Windows 2003 Terminal Services to perform daily activities within the accounting software without any issues.

The security of SeaView Research systems is also far better with the implementation of Microsoft Internet Security and Accelerator server.

With the ‘frustration factor’ a thing of the past, reliable technology systems and problem free operations are a reality for SeaView Research network. “We’re delighted with the technology supplied by Microsoft, and are equally delighted with the partner that has solved our issues. Solutions@MBA brings enthusiasm to their work, finding solutions instead of coming to us with problems,” says Bruce Wilner.

Was the project worth it? “Without a doubt,” states Wilner. “The measure of the worth doesn’t always come down to dollars and cents; from a company of SeaView Research’s size, this project represented a considerable investment, but that has been recouped in many ways, such as the productivity that has been gained, the frustrations that have been solved, the reliability and advantage of having the information we need to do our jobs available all the time. It was a tough decision, but I’m glad to say that we have made the right one,” he concludes.

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