YTI Career Institute
EducationCustomer Experience
“We have found great value in tapping D&E resources for their deep technical knowledge. They’ve proven themselves ten times over, and are now one of our primarily providers of service. YTI has completed many successful projects with the highly skilled help of D&E.”
Chuck Farraj
Chief Technology Officer Liberty Higher Education
Vice President of IT and communications Services, YTI Career Institute
Case Study
Problem
YTI has a talented group of internal IT professionals. However, like most growing medium sized organizations, their schedules were filled putting out IT fires which gave them no real time to build the proper processes to avoid flame ups in the first place. When Chuck Farraj, Vice President of IT and Communications Services, YTI Career Institute came on board in early 2007, he saw this immediately and knew they needed some help. But how could they re-allocate resources when many of those resources were already strained?
D&E’s Solution
Early in Mr. Farraj’s tenure at YTI in York, PA, he took a meeting with Account Executive, Larry Arnold of D&E Communications. Larry quickly brought in D&E IT Network Architect, Brian Weigle. D&E’s initial project was to bring up an exchange server so YTI could use Outlook Anywhere, adding an optional alternate to web mail. With four local campuses and connections to their parent company in Texas, this added a significant boost in security and productivity.
In addition, as part of this first Exchange project, D&E participated in a hardware refresh, establishing a connection with Exchange to their headquarters in Texas and D&E enhanced YTI’s security and redundancy on their web access servers.
However, as Brian further aligned himself with their IT department, he realized that to truly optimize their network, they needed a better framework in which to work. As each successive project came to a close, Brian, an 12 year veteran of IT and currently holds a MCSE in Windows 2003 set out to develop a series of policies and procedures to keep their network secure and productive. And, it eliminated much of the down time they had incurred before.
Mr. Weigle gives an example, ““For instance, the existing configuration didn’t differentiate network locations in the logon and network access process, so a user attempting to logon to the network from the Altoona campus might connect to a server in Mechanicsburg, nearly 75 miles away and across slower network links rather than the local server in Altoona. When we reconfigured Active Directory, traffic stayed local and the logon process was sped up, and valuable WAN bandwidth was preserved for desired traffic.”
Next, D&E is doing a technology refresh for their offices in Texas. Liberty Education will replace the physical servers, and Brian and his D&E team will load all necessary software remotely from here in central pa. And, do it according to the book.
