Technology Associates Kenya deploys the largest Data centre at Kenya Ports Authority.
Kenya Ports Authority is Kenya’s leading Public Sector corporation employing over 6500 people and managing the largest Trade gateway for East & Central Africa. Leading Kenya’s charge into e-Government initiatives, KPA embarked on an ambitious IT program to address their future vision of converting KPA into a comprehensive “e-Port”. Having selected SAP to deploy their complete suite of mySAP.com ERP applications, KPA called for bids to deploy a mission-critical, highly redundant data processing server farm.
 The datacenter server infrastructure solution will also form the foundation upon which KPA’s future critical business applications such as KPA’s Container Terminal management software and their Waterfront systems, will be deployed.
We deployed HP's first Wildfire series, multi-processor HP GS80 Tru64Unix AlphaServers in a clustered environment with HP’s world leading StorageWorks Modular Array 8000 storage system as their production environment. The Development and Quality Assurance Servers were the HP AlphaServer DS 20e and the HP AlphaServer ES45 respectively.
The HP AlphaServer GS Server farm was the largest data processing centre in the region at the time, offering KPA a powerful combination of exceptional performance, extraordinary scalability, ultra high availability and flexible management. These systems feature a modular building- block architecture that allows new technologies to be incorporated into the system, as they become available, dynamic hardware partitions, where a single system can be subdivided into multiple subsystems. The latest ‘capacity on demand’ provisions were included where additional reserves could be activated online, anytime.
Kenya Ports Authority was also the first corporate to contract the enterprise licensing and services agreement in a comprehensive engagement with Microsoft. As the first Microsoft Gold partner for Support services in East and central Africa, Technology Associates Kenya were registered the enterprise software consultant for the project, which involved designing their entire IT architecture for the corporation around Microsoft’s Active Directory services. The architecture would offer Improved security, Seamless management and Scalability across KPA’s locations at the Mombasa head office and inland container terminals at Embakasi and Kisumu, which are connected across a VSAT network. The project included the implementation of an enterprise-wide MS Exchange Server 2003 based mail and messaging infrastructure as well as MS ISA Server 2003 for internet security. Technology Associates Kenya’s Microsoft consultants re-deployed the latest Microsoft office client applications under a major migration project. KPA also awarded Technology Associates Kenya the largest public sector outsourced services SLA for their comprehensive IT infrastructure across all locations, which is being manned by a 7 man on-site helpdesk. We look forward to a long and healthy relationship with Kenya’s largest public sector company and certainly the first to have made strides towards e-governance. |
