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About Ego Pharmaceuticals

Ego Pharmaceuticals equips new headquarters to support ongoing global growth. We wanted to adopt a modular architecture so that capacities could be readily increased over time. Linktech staff worked alongside the architect and builders to ensure networking and hardware components were installed at the appropriate times in the build process.

Our Work

Challenge

During 2015, to support the company’s ongoing growth, a decision was made to construct a new purpose-built facility in the Melbourne suburb of Dandenong South. The chosen 9.5 hectare site was to become home to a headquarters building and a manufacturing plant.

Ego Pharmaceuticals Head of IT, David Slattery, says construction of the new headquarters gave the company an opportunity to refresh its entire IT infrastructure. Rather than moving equipment from its old facility in Braeside, it was decided to start with a blank sheet of paper and design everything from scratch.

“We wanted to have in place an infrastructure that would support our current requirements as well as underpin our future growth,” says Slattery. “We wanted to use it as an opportunity to review everything we had in place and select the most appropriate options in each category.”

Slattery says the company had been working with Linktech Australia for about three years on a range of IT projects. After discussion and evaluation, the decision was taken to engage the company to plan and implement the new IT infrastructure.

“We had a high-level perspective of what we wanted to have in place and Linktech worked closely with our IT team to take those ideas and create a detailed design. When you are working with a green field site, it offers lots of opportunities but also creates lots of challenges and we knew we would need their expertise and experience.”
David Slattery

Head of IT

Our Work

Solution

Work began on the design phase in mid-2015 and emphasis was placed on ensuring the new infrastructure would offer reliability, mobility and redundancy. This involved the creation of a private cloud to ensure requirements for scalability and performance would be achieved.

“We were particularly keen to ensure the new infrastructure offered simplicity and functionality to meet our requirements while at the same time reduced our operational overheads,” says Slattery. “We also wanted to adopt a modular architecture so that capacities could be readily increased over time.”

Once the design had been agreed, deployment began and was carried out during the building’s construction. Linktech staff worked alongside the architect and builders to ensure networking and hardware components were installed at the appropriate times in the build process. All works were completed by the time staff began moving into the facility in December.

Taking the lead from the experts at Linktech Australia Slattery says a Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage SmartStack platform was chosen as the core of the new infrastructure and housed within a purpose-build computer room in the new building. VMware vSphere software was deployed to create the required virtual servers on which the company’s production applications would run. “We selected SmartStack because it has been designed to provide high availability with no single point of failure,” he says. “The Nimble array delivers 72TB of high-performance storage capacity per array that can be shared across all our applications.”

The Linktech team installed a wired networking infrastructure, based on HPE technology, and an HPE Aruba wireless network covering all office and manufacturing areas. The HPE network has a chassis-based core, combining 10Gb and 1Gb interfaces, with 1Gb edge switches for end-user equipment.

The team also deployed a Veeam backup and recovery infrastructure to ensure redundancy and provide disaster recovery capabilities for all applications. Data is replicated between the new headquarters and the facilities in Braeside each night.

Our Work

Results

With the new infrastructure now fully operational, Ego staff are enjoying its high performance and reliability.

“Our SAP application and production line controller systems are operating effectively and the network is providing high-speed access for all users,” says Slattery. “The whole project was completed on time and on budget.”

The Ego IT team is handing day-to-day management and maintenance of the infrastructure while Linktech provides helpdesk and consulting services on an ongoing basis.

“Linktech delivered outstanding customer service throughout the project and continues to assist us with support as it’s required,” he says. “They take a long-term view of customer relationships, and I am confident they will remain a valuable partner for the company well into the future.”