IT Infrastructure

A Government organization responsible for the delivery and dissemination of weather forecast guidance products had too many legacy IT contracts and contractors. RedLine assisted with consolidating and optimizing the infrastructure staff into one team under a single contract, thereby increasing infrastructure reliability and reducing operational costs.

Challenge

Over numerous years, a Government organization’s national forecast guidance centers had grown to maintain individual contracts with Information Technology (IT) teams that supported separate site infrastructures. The customer engaged RedLine to consolidate its IT contractors into one centralized, highly skilled infrastructure/analyst support team with fewer, more effective members.

Solution

First, the RedLine team systematically evaluated the customer’s existing technical staff and reduced headcount from 15 to the nine most effective members. To centralize mission support for all of the organization’s centers, RedLine helped create a single IT help desk.

Working to increase capability for high-use periods during severe weather events, RedLine developed and implemented a set of standardized best practices to maintain reliability, availability, and help desk support capacity. The Linux system administration team maintains over 90 percent of the customer’s infrastructure, which keeps the systems up and running efficiently 24/7. The centralized team’s daily responsibilities include:

• 24/7 on-call rotation and support for mission-critical systems
• Day-to-day maintenance and support of all customer Linux workstations and servers
• Support for Microsoft Windows infrastructure administration for a wide range of Microsoft office suite versions
• Maintenance of core services such as DNS, web and email/data dissemination services for numerous customer sites

Based on in-depth knowledge of operational supercomputing, RedLine also recruited and hired a team of supercomputer production analysts to monitor, troubleshoot, and manage the production application/model suite used to gather and optimize the data to properly execute forecast models.

Results

• Lowered operating costs and increased systems reliability and availability by centralizing, reducing, and optimizing the number of the technical staff, and implementing best practices
• Increased communication for support among the customer sites impacted by the consolidation of support contracts
• Increased effectiveness and consistency when applying updates and patches