Overview
The CN Tower
(http://www.cntower.ca) is
Canada's most recognizable and celebrated landmark. While the tower is an
international symbol of Canadian ingenuity, it also serves as a critical
broadcasting and telecommunications hub for Canadian radio and television
broadcasting. The tower's construction involved more than 1,537 workers and in
excess of 4,800 man-hours. Standing at a height of 553.33m, the CN Tower has
come to define Toronto's skyline and attracts more than two million visitors
each year.
Challenges
On April
2, 1975, one year before its completion, the CN Tower was given the title of
World's Tallest Free-Standing Structure, by the Guinness Book of World Records.
In the years following, the tower has broken records many times in the famous
book, winning such titles as World's Longest Metal Staircase, World's Tallest
Building and, most recently, the World's Highest Wine Cellar. In 1995, the CN
Tower was classified by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the
Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
Today, the spherical structure
sitting atop of the tower, more than 333m in the air, serves as the year-round
workplace for more than 550 people. The tower's employees help to make possible
the world-class entertainment, attractions, exhibits, and food and beverage
venues that exemplify the CN Tower experience.
Challenges
In Spring 1997, the CN Tower's new management
team TrizecHahn Corporation announced a massive renewal project that called for
improvements to the structure and operations of the tower. The ultimate goal was
to re-launch the CN Tower as one of the world's premier entertainment
destinations. The new Tower would feature dynamic multimedia experiences, new
entertainment attractions and innovative food and shopping
marketplaces.
A key part of the renewal plan
involved a major overhaul the building's IT infrastructure. When Amy Tong joined
the CN Tower staff in 1997as vice-president of finance and administration, she
quickly realized how small the IT department was compared to the size of the
structure. "When I came on board, I found a combination of many different
technologies powering the World's Tallest Building," she recalls. "I knew that I
would have my work cut out for me."
What Tong found was a Token
Ring network with mixed protocols, two Microsoft WindowsNT Servers 3.5.1, a
financial system based on AS/400 and OS2, a food and beverage application
running UNIX, and DBase4 housing reservation activities. These disparate systems
made information sharing and retrieval difficult and inconvenient.
Evaluation Phase
In
1998, the CN Tower hired Smartech Consulting Inc. of Toronto to manage the IT
renewal project. Systems were analyzed to discover how applications interfaced
with one another. The project team evaluated various new technologies including
mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, point of sale (POS)
systems, inventory systems and communications systems, enabling the team to plan
an effective strategy for deploying new IT systems.
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Technical Roadmap
Implementation
The CN Tower's
goal was to seamlessly consolidate the tower's mission-critical systems by
implementing a standard software platform. The required solution had to be
proven, robust and versatile, and would need to integrate desktop, network,
e-mail and ticketing systems while providing superior security.
Microsoft was chosen as the
main software provider because it offered the most scalable platform for use
with mission-critical systems. According to Tong, Microsoft offered a familiar
and intuitive environment while providing simplified administration at the
back-end.
For reliability, scalability
and ease of management, the CN Tower chose Microsoft WindowsNT as its operating
platform of choice and Dell workstations as the hardware base.
Microsoft Office 97 was
deployed throughout the organization to boost productivity, enhance
collaboration and facilitate data analysis. Microsoft Outlook, the messaging and
collaboration client in Microsoft Office, helps users stay up-to-date and
informed through its built-in scheduling and calendar functions.
Microsoft's comprehensive
messaging platform, Exchange Server 5.5, was deployed to enhance the CN Tower's
business critical communication and collaboration needs. Microsoft Proxy
Server's firewall security, content caching and management tools were brought in
to address Internet-enabling issues such as security, manageability, and
cost.
Additional software
applications, such as a corporate fax server (for faxing from any workstation)
and dial-in server (for remote workers), were rolled out to enhance overall
business operations and productivity. A secure remote dial-in infrastructure was
implemented - critical to businesses that operate 24 hours a day.
Business critical information
is stored, accessed and analysed using Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server
7.0. The Microsoft SQLServer platform is able to scale to fit the unique
database needs of any size organization. SQLServer incorporated seamlessly with
the CN Tower's new and existing applications. Active data objects were coded to
SQLServer via Transaction Server. Data aggregation and analysis were made
possible through the use of Microsoft's Online Analytical Processing.
The new data warehouse and
intranet solution that manages and distributes the tower's internal knowledge
assets run on Microsoft BackOffice Server 4.5 and SQLServer 7.0. Internet
Information Server 4.0, the embedded web server within Microsoft WindowsNT, is
the foundation for the company's intranet solution and active server pages (ASP)
ensure that employees never view static information.
Once the foundation was laid,
the CN Tower turned its attention to networking infrastructure migration. Within
five months, the IT team was able to migrate its Token Ring LAN to an Ethernet
solution; assess physical network topology; converge three separate LANs, fiber
optics, network devices, network switches using TCP/IP protocol; and, create an
intranet-based network monitoring facility.
"Network topology and protocol
migration are often considered complex projects, mainly because of the
dependencies involved," says Felix Chau of Smartech Consulting Inc. "Microsoft
allowed us to convert our networking architecture seamlessly and transparently
to all of the CN Tower's applications," says Chau. "For instance, we could not
move the JD Edward ERP off the AS/400 to the new NT platform quickly enough. We
therefore implemented Microsoft SNA Server and within a week we had moved over
to the new IP network. Microsoft SNA Server worked seamlessly to make all the
workstations think that they had an SNA link to the AS/400 when in fact they
only had TCP/IP."
Because it was important to
create a fast TCP/IP-only network, Chau and his team designed and deployed a
secure and fast Ethernet switched IP network infrastructure. "Using Microsoft
TCP/IP as the only network protocol, a unified and standardized network reduced
the cost of maintenance and administration right away," says Chau.
By the Spring of 1999, all
mission-critical systems were updated. This included: replacing the AS/400
financial information system with the latest NT-based JD Edward OneWorld ERP;
implementing a state-of-the-art touch screen food and beverages system to
replace the UNIX-based restaurant POS system; creating a 32-bit NT-based
graphical reservation system to replace the tower's DOS-based reservation
system; and, enhancing the table management and food inventory systems through
bar coding technology, saving time and money and creating more accurate data
collection.
The final step in the CN
Tower's technology transformation was the creation of an intranet solution.
Enterprise objects, data mining objects and user tools for maintaining
departmental sub-Webs helped make the CN Tower's intranet site possible.
Microsoft Site Server is being used to store user profiles as well as to manage
the site. The IT team continues to add content such as bulletin boards,
discussion groups, graphics libraries, photo albums, and enhanced online reports
and applications.
