Kaanapali Beach Hotel
Solution Profile
Outsourcing agreement where CTA Engineering manages 10 servers, 50 desktops and touch screens for the Kaanapali Beach Hotel (KBH). All servers and desktops are running a standard image of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating System. Microsoft Exchange 2000 provides mail support and collaboration for all users. Microsoft Windows 2000 terminal server is used for all retail points, the front desk and the food & beverage department.
The Problem
The Kaanapali Beach Hotel up until a few years ago had maintained their operations with hand written ledgers. The process was slow and prone to error. The hotel wanted to automate operations and move toward a paperless work environment. The hotel decided on an application that would manage their operations. The application was DOS based but provided the ability to manage every aspect of the hotel operations, from the reservation process, billing, food & beverage, property maintenance, key coding and retail sales. The hotel needed to implement a stable network environment for the system to work. The hotel contracted with a local vendor to perform the installation. After one year of downtime, lost data and lost revenues the hotel had enough. KBH contracted with CTA Engineering to fix the problem once and for all.
The Solution
CTA completely re-built the network with minimal disruptions to the daily operations. The whole process took 13 days from start to finish. For the last two years CTA Engineering has been maintaining the network remotely with periodic site visits. The original Windows 2000 Active Directory installation had been compromised by an outsider from the Internet. One of our first goals during the 13 day installation window was to secure the hotel from any Internet attacks. Once a firewall was in place and properly configured, we proceeded to rebuild the network. The challenge was to maintain the hotels existing operations while building the new Active Directory domain and forest. Using automation scripts we were able to successfully rebuild all of the user accounts. Once the new domain was in place we scheduled a cutover where all the desktops would automatically join the new Windows 2000 domain. Once the PC’s were in the new domain our next task was to migrate all of the mail from the old Exchange 5.5 server to the new Exchange 2000 server. Once the mail server was completed the next task was to re-build the Windows 2000 terminal servers. The terminal servers had become an integral part of the hotels operations. The terminal server implementation was designed with load balancing to provide type of fault tolerance and performance improvements for the users. The terminal servers were built with exact images so the users could work seamlessly on either machine. All user profiles and documents were stored on a NAS server to allow users to seamlessly move about hotel and maintain their data.
Solution Benefits
- CTA Engineering provides Microsoft Gold support to the KBH
- CTA Engineering works remotely saving the hotel personnel costs
- A stable network environment to run other applications and services to make the KBH personnel more productive. Other applications include the hotels host system which manages every aspect of the hotel and an accounting package
- A responsive helpdesk
- A stable terminal server environment
- Scheduled maintenance and on-site support
- Disaster recovery implementation and planning
- Secure, stable environment to build the existing operations
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