Moving Picture Company
Plan-Net steps in to modernise communications infrastructure
The Moving Picture Company has been involved in the creation of visual arts on some of the most popular movies of recent times. One of the success stories of the film industry, the MPC boast big-budget productions such as Batman Begins, Corpse Bride and the Harry Potter franchise amongst its works.
Unfortunately its email systems were having trouble keeping up. The Moving Picture Company deals primarily in digital content and over the years it had increasingly come to rely on digital communications as its primary form of contact both internally and with the outside world.
Creative staff at the MPC use email as the primary resource for sending examples of work to clients around the world and with the contents of these emails varying from a single shot to a full clip an increasingly heavy load was placed on the communications infrastructure as the business grew.
As data volumes rose and the company became more dependent on email it became apparent that the infrastructure was unable to cope. Two separate systems had developed independently within the company, closely tied to separate teams. The back office administrative staff used Microsoft Exchange 5.5 for their email while the 350 creative professionals were using a completely different system based around Linux. In order to support the different environments the company's IT staff were split in half.
"We needed someone who could breathe new life into our email system quickly and with little fuss," recalls Jason Cooper, Head of IT at MPC. "We had little control over some of the most important parts of our system and with such disjointed communications we were at a disadvantage in an industry that relies on fast, efficient interaction."
Because the two mail systems in use at the MPC were so disparate the company's ability to communicate internally was severely compromised. The Linux systems had no centralised management interface or archiving function and the Active Directory system used to enable the Windows server to manage employee credentials could not include those staff using the separate Linux system. This had the effect of splitting the company right down the middle.
Plan-Net were given the brief of modernising the company's communications infrastructure to turn it into a singular entity capable of dealing with the heavy demands of the MPC's growing workload.
Plan-Net began the process by implementing a structured, three-stage design and planning process beginning with an initial infrastructure review before moving on to staff interviews. The interviews were designed to help Plan-Net understand the nature of MPC's business needs and doubled as an excellent way to get employees involved at an early stage. This helped to encourage buy-in from the people that would go on to use the system on a daily basis and increase the likelihood of a successful project.
"It quickly became clear that Plan-Net's team knew how to listen," says Cooper. "During the design and planning process they quickly understood the needs of our business and were able to tailor a solution that worked for us."
MPC needed to move to a single, high-availability platform and Microsoft was the best fit. Using a Microsoft system provided a solid base from which to manage all of the MPC's mail centrally and provide all employees with access to a central group calendar service.
Many of the creative professionals who were used to the Linux system had to be persuaded to switch. The creative staff at the MPC are very technical and challenged Plan-Net on Exchange's feature set, something which Plan-Net overcame with the help of staff interviews, as explained by Dave Pratt, Plan-Net's Head of Infrastructure;
"To begin with we encountered technical camps that wouldn't speak to each other. We set about conducting workshops that explained the capabilities of the new system to the non-Microsoft people and once we started to speak to both groups and demonstrated the capabilities of Exchange, there was positive feedback from both sides."
Having achieved buy-in from the creative staff the technical work could begin. The MPC already had Dell 2850 servers with RAID storage in place, one of which was dedicated to running NT4 and the other to running Exchange 5.5. Plan-Net installed Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003, each on dedicated servers while another Active Directory domain controller also ran from its own hardware.
During the migration Plan-Net took the opportunity to upgrade MPC's email protection systems. Previously there had been some rudimentary content filtering on the custom-written Linux mail relay with some of the spam stopped by Sophos, a well-respected anti-virus product. The downside of this system was that by the time the mails reached the server they had already taken up valuable network bandwidth on the MPC's LAN. To combat this Plan-Net replaced all previous forms of protection with Mail Marshall Exchange, which runs on its own server at the gateway, stopping malicious emails before they find their way on to the network.
Under the new set-up, all of the MPC's servers are located in one central IT room, however as they are connected over an Ethernet link as MPC continues to grow their new environment is flexible enough to change with them;
"The product is future-proof" explains Pratt, "The servers can be located across the world from each other if necessary, which gives MPC the opportunity to alter its IT structure as the need arises."
The successful installation took less than two weeks, though Plan-Net's involvement didn't end there. The MPC required their email system to be highly available and the best way to ensure this was to install a mirrored failover solution. After MPC's existing hardware supplier had tried and failed to implement a functioning, reliable solution for high availability, Plan-Net was called back in to help. The successful solution was NeverFail, a mirrored server failover product that Dave Pratt had successfully deployed in many previous projects.
Thanks to its new infrastructure, MPC has a world-class platform capable of handling email and calendar services for the whole organisation. Archiving is easier and users no longer worry about email failing at a crucial point in the production process. According to Cooper, the most satisfying outcome of the project is the improvement to internal communications at the MPC;
"The unified system has made life easier and opened up the communication flow within the company. Creative staff can now book meetings and resource with the help of the server rather than having to hunt for each other around the office. Our employees are in touch all the time and we have been able to integrate our administrative and creative processes in ways that were simply not possible before."
