Case Study Webserver Upgrade

The Client

Education Advocacy [EA] is a fee paying advocacy service with national coverage that helps parents of children with Special Educational Needs obtain appropriate special educational provision, including a place in an appropriate school place.
EA has many years’ experience of working with parents whose children have Special Educational Needs [SEN].

The Challenge

Several inconvenient, publicly embarrassing and unexpected outages due to the failures with the webhosting meant that Education Advocacy urgently needed to replace and upgrade its hosting arrangements.  As Education Advocacy main IT supplier Westgate IT was asked to urgently specify, quote and then procure a new webserver able to meet the longer term needs of the client. Existing backup and restore systems also had weaknesses which need resolving quickly.

Business Solution

Once the request from Education Advocacy was received by Westgate IT an engineer was immediately tasked with delivering the project. Westgate IT did a quick technical analysis of the existing site and contents of the webserver including the backend code and sized and specified a new webserver. The server was priced and the quote submitted to Education Advocacy. Education Advocacy made a quick decision, the contract was awarded to Westgate IT and then work started. Backups were made, webserver operating systems were configured, website content and code was migrated, it was all tested thoroughly by Westgate and a small UAT team from Education Advocacy, and then the cutover from the old ISP to Westgate IT occurred as the domains were repointed. In elapsed time end to end it took less than 5 working days.

Outcome

Within five working days Westgate IT had specified, sized, quoted, procured, migrated, tested and implemented a new higher performance webserver for Education Advocacy. The project involved migrating all the content totalling 500mb and testing it thoroughly prior to cutover. A very successful project which although small in value, was of great importance to Education Advocacy and its longer term plans to improve the way it uses the web to communicate with its clients and potential customers.