An Interview with TI

Sam Blunk is manager of information systems and services NT serverengineering. Here's what he had to say about TI's NT deployment.

What did you like about the project'simplementation?

Through a combination of several factors including hardware platform, setup,maintenance schedules, and monitoring, NT Server has gone far beyond ourprevious server platform in its reliability (99.5 percent 24 X 7 in North Texas,or 4.4 Sigma from Motorola's Six Sigma quality methodology), large-scaleintegration, and position as a foundation for future Microsoft productofferings.

What didn't you like about the project'simplementation?

NT's domain model does not adequately support TI's distributedadministration environment in which each major site has its own Help desk and ISadministrative staff. Many of the difficulties we experienced with our NTdeployment such as granting resource domain administrators adequate rights inthe master domain to change their own users's passwords come from this onepoint.

What would you do differently on the project?

We would be better prepared for the increase in support costs. Unlike in themainframe environment, with NT support personnel costs are much higher. Insteadof three or four mainframe images, you have literally hundreds of miniaturemainframes, each with hundreds of failure points. This increase affects allsupport areas, including

Automation is critical to keep support costs down, and administration toolssuch as Mission Critical Software's Enterprise Administrator, ExecutiveSoftware's DisKeeper, and New Technology Partner's Quota Manager have onlyrecently become available or usable in a large environment. Management tools forthe whole environment are few or nonexistent.

What advice can you give your peers?

Don't rush through your planning phase, regardless of how impatient yourcustomers are. Seemingly minor decisions can affect your NT network. Forexample, the percentage of domain controllers vs. domain servers in your designwill greatly increase the number of trust sessions and amount of accountdatabase replication. You need to consider factors such as physical location andnetwork subnetting (present or planned) in the site. Design with an eye towardNT 5.0.