Phone: (516) 536-4531
 
 
David Johnson  


Unix Upgrade Project

One of my larger projects as a Senior Consultant for NCR was to develop and implement a plan to upgrade ALL Unix server for a major customer nationwide. This customer had over 1800 NCR Unix system throughout the country which needed to be upgraded before the year 2000. Due to poor customer planning this request came in near the end of 1999 as an emergency request. My task was to design a plan to upgrade all these systems in the shortest time possible. Another issue to consider was that a typical system upgrade required the system to be offline 6-8 hours.
As an out of the box thinker, I was able to develop a plan that not only  was able to upgrade all of these system in only a few months but also did it well below the budgeted cost. Realizing the high cost of travel and the declining cost of computer hard drives I developed a plan where all systems upgrades were performed remotely by a small team of 7 consultants. This plan almost completely eliminated the need for travel and took advantage of lower skilled remote technicians just to install a hard disk in remote machines. With new drives preloaded with a new version of the operating system as well as customer developed scripting I was able to perform all of the upgrades ahead of schedule and below budget all while significantly reducing system down time. With this innovative process system down time was limited to only a few minutes required to reboot the server and slide in a new hard disk.

Hit Counter