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Company Background:
 Steel Dynamics, Inc Steel Dynamics, Inc. (SDI)
is the nation’s fifth largest producer of carbon
steel products with 2008 annual revenues of $8.1
billion. SDI operates electric arc furnace
mini-mills, steel scrap processing centers, and
steel fabrication facilities. SDI is among the
most profitable American steel companies in
terms of profit margins and operating profit per
ton. Steel Dynamics ranks 318th on the FORTUNE
500 list.
The Challenge:
During the past several years SDI has made a
number of acquisitions and the company quickly
found itself faced with a number of autonomous
technology infrastructures. Each location had an
individual technology staff, server
infrastructure, application infrastructure,
development staff, datacenter, external e-mail
domains, etc. As SDI began to unify their
business model and corporate appearance the need
to consolidate and unify this infrastructure
became paramount. While SDI desired uniformity,
it also recognized the need for upper level
autonomy to allow each organization to prosper
without undue influence by decisions of the
other divisions.
The Solution:
SDI contracted ENS to design the new
environment, generate implementation
documentation, build the base environment, and
work with the different technology staffs on a
project management, implementation, or
consultative basis. Since the goal was for SDI’s
different locations to look very similar in
terms of technology infrastructure, ENS was
tasked with creating a template of migration
tasks. This template would be used to allow each
location to migrate their location. The design
and planning phase resulted in a plan to merge
all of the separate Microsoft Active Directory
(AD) forests into a single new corporate wide AD
forest and AD domain. ENS was able to
effectively use AD security, AD organizational
units (OU), group policies (GPO), and scripting
tools to segregate the separate locations so
each was able to effectively manage and support
their local environment while affording
protection from changes at other locations.
The Technical Aspect:
ENS built the new domain by utilizing
virtualization technology, therefore making the
domain controllers very portable and easily
recoverable. Security was implemented on DNS
zones, AD OU objects, servers and workstations,
file structures, etc., affording the desired
level of divisional autonomy. The Microsoft
Exchange Server infrastructure was developed
using in a single Exchange organization so that
each location had administrator rights to their
respective servers and a unified Global Address
List (GAL).
By implementing this solution SDI
achieved the following benefits:
- Traveling users that
frequent different SDI divisions are able to
utilize one user account no matter what
their physical location. This allows them to
access resources at either their home office
or other visited locations.
- Each location has
increased AD redundancy so that if any of
their domain controllers fail or if disaster
strikes a location the AD information will
remain intact and accessible due because it
is replicated to all locations. This will
allow authentication of the affected users.
- The granulated
technology security infrastructure was
improved. Each location is now cognizant of
a user’s ability to access computers, files,
AD objects, and other resources.
- SDI can more easily
implement corporate wide offerings such as
corporate file sharing, SharePoint services,
Microsoft Office Communication Server, HR
applications, etc.
- SDI now has a unified
Microsoft Exchange Global Address List so
users throughout the entire organization can
more easily communicate. This has eliminated
the need to support and maintain a Microsoft
Identity Integration Services
infrastructure.
ENS was able to help SDI implement their
technology goals so that they can continue to
evolve and grow their company with ease.
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