Nation Media Group selects Technology Associates Kenya as their systems integration partner for deploying their Microsoft and HP data centre infrastructure in Kenya.

Nation Media Group (NMG) is East and Central Africa’s largest media establishment. The organisation has interest in both print and electronic media and own among others the Daily Nation, Nation TV, Nation FM, Taifa Leo and regionally in Tanzania, the Daily and in Uganda, the Monitor newspapers. The group also has integrated lines of business such as their distribution business – Nation Courier, Nation carrier and Nation Marketing that also have international alliances with TNT.

NMG has made heavy investments in its IT set-up & and has one of the most advanced technology environments. While reviewing their IT data processing architecture, NMG planned to deploy an enterprise-scale architecture for their enterprise-wide messaging and active directory services for their comprehensive suite of mission-critical media applications for the print, radio television and web services. The architecture would adhere to compliances for security and best business practices to offer advantages of seamless administration and management. NMG revamped their IT infrastructure including their network by deploying an Extreme Layer 3 gigabit infrastructure that would connect their Nation Centre, Cambrian centre offices with their bureaus in Mombasa and Kisumu and also implement a high speed link to their Mombasa road printing plant, to transfer data from the DTI systems to the plate for printing using the CTP technology. This link is also used for the SAP and messaging applications.

 In what would become on of the most coveted Microsoft projects in the region, NMG awarded Technology Associates Kenya a turnkey project in collaboration with Microsoft and HP, to migrate their predominantly Windows NT domain architecture to a Windows 2000/2003 domain. Their enterprise-wide messaging and collaboration needs would be met with Microsoft Exchange 2003 server.

NMG settled on HP as the deployment platform of choice. As an initial investment towards the implementation of a highly redundant platform they required us to implement HP’s Raid Array 4100 external storage system that fed into two HP Proliant DL 580 clusters for their ADS and Exchange platforms. Along with HP, we designed a high-availability cluster environment with redundancies and fail-over built into the Active directory cluster design.

Being the only vendor who had deployed the maximum number of cluster and Microsoft platform architectures in East Africa, Technology Associates Kenya in collaboration with Microsoft Consultancy services brought rich experience to achieve a successful deployment of the Active Directory Server cluster, Enterprise-wide messaging solution and the rollout of NMG’s desktop environment. We also implemented what was at the time the largest enterprise backup solution with HP and CA using the ArcServe suite of data backup applications. With this solution, the entire back-up procedures at NMG were made un-attended and automated, allowing backup across the LAN/WAN and across all server platforms.

In a subsequent engagement, Terchnology Associates Kenya and CA implemented East & Central Africa’s largest, enterprise-scale IT infrastructure management solution based on CA’s Unicentre TNG suite. Having deployed one of the most ultra-modern IT infrastructures in East Africa, NMG’s heterogeneous environment consists of Solaris, Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Apple Macintosh OS, running various RDBMS’s like Oracle and SQL. Their client access (desktop) environment consists of over 1000 Macs and PCs. It was mission-critical for the corporation to manage this environment and upon a comprehensive evaluation of solutions awarded Technology Associates Kenya and CA to deploy the Unicentre TNG suite of customized help desk and automated asset management solutions.