The LanKey completed reconstruction of IT infrastructure of the Bolshoi Theatre

Goals and Objectives

As well as any other modern organization, the Bolshoi Theatre cannot effectively function without reliable and failsafe information and server framework. By 2014 IT infrastructure of administration rooms of theater required acceptance of a number of measures for improvement therefore the management of the Bolshoi Theatre announced an open competition on reconstruction of the existing IT infrastructure. The winner of competition recognized the LanKey system integrator which proposed the optimal solution corresponding to structure of the tender documentation and answering to the purposes and project tasks on upgrade of IT infrastructure.

Project Progress

At the time of the beginning of works on upgrade, the existing IT infrastructure of the Bolshoi Theatre represented several separate network segments constructed on the diverse equipment and software which provided different services for more than 500 employees from different administrative divisions of theater. Separate network segments created difficulties for users and also required big administrative costs for management of IT infrastructure.

Within accomplishment of obligations under the public contract, the LanKey system integrator made audit of all segments of the existing network and developed the plan of step-by-step data migration and services, with the minimum influence on work of users. As the platform for deployment of new services the 8-nodal cluster of virtual machines on the ProLiant HP server hardware of the 8th generation and a hypervisor of VMware of ESXi was constructed. Old servers were seamlessly migrated in virtual infrastructure by means of P2V and V2V Converter that considerably increased the level of fault tolerance of services, and automatic recovery in case of failure. Tuning of dynamic management of selection of computing powers based on DRS technology (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) is performed that allowed to guarantee the high performance of all services even in hours of peak load. Network infrastructure is constructed on the gigabit Cisco switches Catalyst 3850.

For providing the high level of availability of information, installation of a storage system of HP 3PAR of StoreServ 7200 was made. 3PAR has some of the highest rates of performance and reliability due to use of ASIC processors in disk controllers, uses of multilevel caching and reservation of controllers of DWH. For connection of servers to DWH the optical Fiber Channel interface and completely reserved SAN factory constructed on switches of HP was used. The next stage made consolidation of a directory service from several separate domains and the working groups in one domain Active Directory. The directory service is constructed based on the latest version of the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system. Migration of all accounts of users and computers and also the accompanying services is executed. Transfer of accounting network segment, the Enterprise servers 1C, DBMS, services of remote desktops and file services is made.

Also within the project on reconstruction of IT infrastructure, implementation of a mail cluster of Microsoft Exchange 2013 and migration of all e-mail from the old mail server based on Linux is made. For ensuring fault tolerance of a mail system, replication of mail bases using DAG technology (Database Availability Group) is configured and also balancing of loading of client access using clusters of IIS ARR (Application Request Routing) is provided. Reservation, balancing and filtering of the entering flow of e-mail it is implemented by means of two mx-records and two boundary Exchange EDGE servers. As multiechelon protection against spam and viruses GFI MailEssentials system implementation was made.

For ensuring mobility of users the possibility of full-function remote work with mail, calendars and contacts by means of mobile devices, smartphones and tablets is configured.

Result

On completion of works on reconstruction, all key objects set by the management of the Bolshoi Theatre were achieved:

• radically availability of all information systems, at the expense of a clustering of the equipment, services and databases increased;
• administrative costs thanks to centralization of control of the equipment and services were reduced;
• labor productivity of users due to consolidation and structuring all information increased;
• speed of the solution of business matters, due to online remote access to information from mobile devices increased.

As a result of the executed project of the largest the theater and the cultural center of the Russian culture and art operates modern, reliable and failsafe IT infrastructure.