Expanding with force

Steelforce Australia is a local Brisbane company that has been experiencing success in the steel business through distribution, manufacturing and trading. It also owns plants in Delhi and China and exports raw materials from Australia back to the plants, then manufactures it into steel and brings it back to Australia. The company prides itself on being able to cater for customers’ needs in one location including cutting steel to size.

Experiencing rapid growth, the organisation has had to undergo three separate moves in the past five years but is now settled at Rocklea, Brisbane.

Steelforce has also acquired Sydsteel, based at Blacktown in Sydney, to further expand operations. In Brisbane alone the number of employees increased from 28 in 2002 to 65 last year. In 2006 the company engaged IT Associates to help grow from the initial branch based in Brisbane.

“They grew quite dramatically, they had one server in Brisbane supporting a team of about 25 users at the time and we grew that to support six branch offices by the end of the year,” explained Nigel Heyn, managing director of IT Associates. “We implemented a private network as well as all of the HP equipment such as Proliant servers. We then centralised all of the equipment.”

Instead of having the one server located on site, IT Associates transferred everything to the data centre. This enabled Steelforce to have the platform grow including new software and new hardware. The solution was working successfully and then they decided to work on a new project that addressed server consolidation and data recovery.

“We worked quite closely with Ingram and the VMware team and designed a new solution. Server consolidation was one area that we looked at because the company went from having one server to eight servers at the end of 2006 so we needed to reconsolidate it back down to three servers.

“The focus wasn’t purely consolidation – it was disaster recovery or high availability. Steelpoint is taking orders from around the country to provide steel to manufacturing operations and without the ability to have systems up and running it obviously inhibited the ability to put orders through so that was the core focus of building a much more robust system,” said Heyn.