Technique

Dan Cameron

As the company has grown, so have its technical demands. The systems we employ locally at our offices include our email server, accounting server and sales CRM server, as well as various databases and file servers. In an ideal world this growth would occur in an orderly and anticipatable manner. In the real world, our IT department has had to rapidly deal with increased demands on our network and servers, while at the same time developing new systems and digital processes which further stress our infrastructure.

Much like a small town that turns into urban sprawl due to an economic boom, a network can suffer because of rapid expansion. It's easy to add a server here or a small switch there without taking into account needs such as backup, power usage and heat generation. But those needs add up over time and can present an additional risk of failure for your equipment. It can be hard to keep scale in mind when you are uncertain about future growth.

Earlier this year, PacificBasin's Information Technology department moved to the aio Group - PacificBasin's parent company. Our concerns have now grown to include the technical needs of seven sister companies.

The good part about this latest expansion in IT's responsibilities is that we are finally looking at our overall technology status and taking the time to properly build out our needs for the future. We have begun a process to create an aio company datacenter to house our servers and equipment. We hope to begin building out the datacenter by January 2005 and are already deeply involved in the design stage. I look forward to sharing some of the challenges we are facing as we move toward flipping the switch to the on position. Wish us luck!