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• 2010

Sony DADC: Potential Record-Breaking Client-Migration

Sony DADC has been manufacturing top quality replication and solutions for optical media since 1986, such as Blu-ray discs, DVDs, audio CDs and CD-ROMs. The company is headquartered in Salzburg and operates a global network of 11 production facilities in Europe, China, Australia, USA, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and India. Sony DADC and its work force of 1,600 employees in Austria generated revenues of EUR 480 million in the period April 2006 – March 2007, producing more than 650 million discs annually. Sony DADC, itself a trendsetter and prominent technological giant, attaches great importance to a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure.

In the heart of the central IT nervous system

Within the framework of the Group strategy, the decision was made to migrate the server and client systems to a new Microsoft Active Directory platform. In the course of the tender process, it became apparent that S&T Austria would be awarded the contract on the basis of its submitted project plan. “At first, we wanted to put a small project into the hands of S&T in order to bundle the experiences gained. However, the S&T team succeeded in convincing us, both on a professional and personal level, to dare to jointly carry out this extremely critical conversion together”, says Harald Absmann, IT manager at Sony DADC. Accordingly, interfering in the “central nervous system” of the IT infrastructure required a particularly careful planning phase. After making adjustments to the productive server, the challenge was to implement the migration of 2,000 clients from Novell Netware to an Active Directory administration.

2,000 clients who should not notice anything

Interfering with or compromising work processes during the main autumn production period was a strict taboo. For this reason, the specialists decided in favor of a two-phased migration. The first phase i.e. the migration of the server and 200 clients took place from April to August. The second phase focusing on the migration of the remaining 1,800 clients was originally planned for the month of January in the following year.

The uninstalling process for Novell Netware Client was carried out automatically by means of scripts. The clients were installed via Active Director enabling the global administration of basic network services, file and print clusters using state-of-the-art technologies.

The Active Directory platform considerably simplifies administrative tasks carried out by the IT team at Sony DADC and facilitates the management and control of access and user authorization. A spirit of optimism and added impetus prevailed after the initial migration to the new system. Employees only had to reboot their computers once, which meant that their work was basically not affected at all. This success led the responsible managers to implement the second phase ahead of time. “The migration proceeded completely on schedule, so that we had full confidence in S&T when the decision was made to convert the entire system right in the midst of the peak production period. Today we are glad that we chose S&T to be our partner for this project“, Harald Absmann concludes.