Summary of Activities and Deliverables
Designed and deployed first privately owned data center in Vanuatu was a significant challenge. Since CNS is a for profit privately owned business we had to fund our own data center building operations. Just surviving as a private business in Vanuatu is a hard challenge let alone generating enough revenue to start a small data center. But over the years we managed to do it by:
- procuring cheap commodity hardware as opposed to expensive branded hardware to get started;
- reducing recurring expenses by replacing all equipment with power efficient hardware to reduce power consumption and work towards a more green organisation;
- adopted server virtualisation to consolidate servers making better use of hardware, reduce electricity consumption, ease management and increase security;
- building on an entirely open source software stack to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and recurring expenses;
- put efforts in training and skills;
- putting the data center to use by developing new services and revenue streams;
The data center was built from the ground up starting from a messy computer room to a fully air conditioned secure server room environment within the CNS building. More to come on the services running on the data center but to give an idea of the achievement look at the "before" and "after" illustration below (photo coming soon...).
Below you'll also find a screenshot of CNS website back then, though it has since been changed by staff trained during my time there. It's followed with a brief list of some of the technologies running in the data center
- Enterprise grade open source firewall;
- Best of breed network traffic monitoring tools;
- Enterprise grade network infrastructure management system;
- Server virtualisation
- Active directory
- Network attached storage (NAS)
Developed several new services not previously offered within Vanuatu providing an edge over the competition. Since we struggled to compete with foreign businesses on the typical services of that time (i.e. desktop support, sales) one option was to diversify our service offerings. We became the first ones to offer advanced services not typically available with local ICT service providers at the time. The new services included:
- designing small websites based on content management system (CMS) at the time little known open source technologies for developing websites;
- databases development also entirely based on open source stacks (e.g. PostgreSQL/MySQL with Rapid Application Development framework such as Django for the UI design);
- management information systems with high quality office activities monitoring and reporting;
- offsite backup solutions; and,
- office servers at reduced TCO by adopting robust equivalents to Microsoft Windows Servers. SME Server was the one used at first but there are now several alternative options as well.
Here are some of the originally developed marketing brochures for these new services. While services have been progressing in their own respective directions since they all still exist in some form the these generic brochures are still in use several years after
Developed standards, policies and procedures for the business which were previously either not present or in need of improvement. Policies, procedures, letters, contracts, service level agreements, proposals and quotations were standardised using best industry templates customized to local context. A knowledge base was setup and is maintained to document policies and procedures among other important organisational knowledge and processes. A screenshot of the company's knowledge base is included below along with a thumbnail example of a standardised document (i.e. proposal template in this case.)
Oversee management of all technical operations and significantly improved service delivery to clients. Yet another strategy to compete against increasing competition was to improve service delivery and response time. A helpdesk system also known as issue tracking system along with a monitoring and reporting framework was developed. Staff were trained on how to make use of this system to more effectively manage service calls from a large number of clients. Below is an illustration of the issue tracking system followed by a couple of custom developed reports for management to help continuously monitor and improve operations.
Improved business-as-usual operations All existing and new services mentioned above were improved significantly. During the time I was there we served over a 100 clients one of more of our the new services developed. Now while CNS faces stiff competition is remains strong with a large and growing number of network deployments, database driven websites, MIS and systems and software integration projects
