Symbian Blog

Following on from my introductory post I thought I’d talk a little bit more about how our IT is run.

As a young organisation we have had the chance to build our IT infrastructure from scratch and my predecessor Suran Naidoo (interim Head of IT) did a sterling job with his team to pull it together.

The tenets that were set down for the infrastructure were that we didn’t need to invest a large amount of capital, that it was software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service and that we favoured open source wherever possible.

So the infrastructure that we have built is largely outsourced to a range of partners. The majority of servers are RedHat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Server with a few Windows servers thrown in for internal purposes. These servers are virtualised around VMWare and we have dipped our toe in the water a little with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

The groupware/collaboration is largely handled by Google Apps – we use this for email and some document collaboration.

We use a range of SaaS services – SAP Business By Design, Salesforce, Spigit, WordPress.

Our websites are largely built around the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) along with a range of other products such as Bugzilla, Mailman, MediaWiki and soon Drupal.

On the desktop side we use Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X with a smattering of Ubuntu. At present we largely use Microsoft Office, and the majority of people browse with Firefox or Safari but Chrome is coming up fast also.

It was a bit of a challenge pulling this altogether – especially in a short time frame. We also found some open source software and SaaS platforms weren’t quite as ready as they claimed to be and had to change course. We didn’t quite achieve our goal of no servers on site, but we do have a lot less than any other site that I have worked on.

Stay tuned for future episodes where I’ll talk about my thoughts on the cloud, choosing open source vs closed source, how do you live open source when you are doing SaaS.