This month saw the departure of Chris Allen as IT manager for CEME. Chris has been with CEME for two years and in this time managed the biggest single project CEME has undertaken since its opening with a £0.5 million network refresh. With Chris Allen's departure Chris George (previously IT Team Leader) has been appointed to fill the management position.

Chris George said  "Being given this opportunity is a great step up for me, but I have some big shoes to fill with Chris Allen's departure. He was a great manager who worked tirelessly for CEME and helped to introduce the biggest IT change CEME has seen since opening. I look forward carrying on from where Chris left off and with the great team that I have with me and moving on to new projects to keep CEME at the forfront of technology"

The upgrade at CEME saw a replacement of the entire backend infrastructure with replacement of switches, firewalls, voice gateways, servers, SAN and the phone system.

Chris George commented " We really are future proofing CEME for the next few years. We have installed the latest Cisco Switches and ASA firewall, and we have teamed this with new voice gateways and upgraded our Cisco phone system in terms of software and hardware. On our server side we have migrated 90% of our servers over to a HP Blade Centre running VM ware and all connected to a new HP EVA 4400 SAN, whilst upgrading existing non VM servers to new hardware. This setup gives us much more flexibility and resilience, plus the technologies we have implemented are tried and tested thus putting us in a position of being at the forefront of Infrastructure Technology."

But the work does not stop there - for the coming year CEME IT will be looking at new Backup Solutions and Business Continuity plans. Whilst in the Engineering Training classrooms a printer refresh is to be planned along with a project to look at replacing and refreshing the PC s to match that of the backend architecture.

Once all these are brought together CEME really will be a technically leading IT facility in the Thames Gateway in London.

Posted by:

Chris George

IT Manager