The UK Atomic Energy Authority (AEA), which works on
decommissioning nuclear reactors, has replaced a 10-year-old
Netware and Novell directory withWindows to support business
reorganisation.
The organisation ran a competitive tender, assessing Novell's
Linux infrastructure against Windows Active Directory, and selected
the
Microsoft product because it was considered less risky.
In an
exclusive video and
podcast with Computer Weekly.com, Chris Broad, head of
information systems and technology at the Atomic Energy Authority,
said, "The initial decision to move to Active Directory was that it
was cheaper and it represented a relatively low and acceptable risk
option. We could demonstrate to the business this could be
done."
The UK Atomic Energy Authority is distributed across 23
locations from the far north coast of Scotland to Dorset and
supports 3,500 PCs. The distributed nature of the AEA meant that
communications was key and it has made extensive use of IP-based
video conferencing and IP telephony to support users. It was an
early adopter of NetWare and the Novell directory services for
providing user authentication on the network.
In 2006 the Atomic Energy Authority moved from being an
independent organisation to working as a commercial entity for the
nuclear decommissioning agency, NDA, on redeveloping old nuclear
reactor sites.
As a result of this reorganisation, the Atomic Energy Authority
had to adapt its IT infrastructure. "We had to logically separate
the IT infrastructure to separate each part of the group," said
Broad.
The existing infrastructure was also costing too much. "We
needed to improve operations, stabilise IT costs and reap the
benefits from new and emerging technologies."
Working with Computacenter, the Atomic Energy Authority used
Microsoft's infrastructure optimisation model (IOM) to benchmark
its existing IT infrastructure against a Microsoft-based network.
Computacenter used this assessment to replace the Novell
infrastructure with Windows Server 2003.
Chris Broad said the on-going benefits have included ease of
integration with other products.
While the new Microsoft infrastructure will support
Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Broad said he had no
plans to upgrade. Since the Atomic Energy Authority was very cost
conscious, Broad said it would usually only migrate if there was a
business driver, such as if support costs started rising or there
was an integration problem with other software. "The nuclear
industry is risk-adverse and as a matter of policy, we do not
automatically upgrade to the latest version," he said.
Watch the video