clients / case studies / businesses

Hughes Corporation

Goal

Upgrading the IT management environment of a leading technology manufacturing company

Solution

A new architecture and a set of updated, customized processes

Results

Introduction

Hughes Corporation is one of the world's leading satellite manufacturers, whose customers span the commercial, scientific and military market. Its information systems division manages all of the networks, systems and applications that support the company's daily engineering and operations activities.

Hughes had a distributed computing environment consisting of a variety of technologies including Sun OS, Solaris, HP-UX, Convex, Novell, NT servers and desktop PCs. Hughes had a homogeneous (Sun OS) Tivoli environment that was long overdue for migration to the latest Tivoli's environment. Their systems management is directly supported by the company's help desk using the Tivoli suite of tools.

Ephibian assisted in updating Hughes’ environment to the new Tivoli environment within four months.

What did we do?

  • Re-architected user and group account management
  • Extended the deployment to a much larger heterogeneous environment
  • Migrated all of the pre-existing customizations to the new environment
  • Developed out a series of custom actions to support Hughes' business, functional, and security requirements
  • Supported users who required accounts across multiple NIS domains and systems
  • All customization tasks were accomplished in Hughes’ laboratory environment

How did we do it?

  • Architected a complete user and group administration solution for Hughes' new implementation
  • Customized the default and validation policies, dialogs, and actions through Tivoli's AEF toolkit
  • Customized actions to support updates of the auto.home map entries, mail aliases entries, and creation of Convex accounts
  • An extract, transform and load (ETL) population scheme was created and scripted to import all of the existing users and groups into the new database with the correct profiles
  • Carried out an NIS domain merge that significantly impacted the population scheme used during the migration
  • Rigorous user and group account administration tests were performed during the entire customization effort

What was the result?

The Hughes help desk experienced minimal impact during the production cutover and immediately had a significant increase in ease of use and functionality. Also, because of our architecture efforts and customization strategy, Hughes was subsequently well-positioned for deploying their Tivoli products. They aggressively pursued full deployment of other Tivoli products (in particular Distributed Monitoring and Event Correlation).