10 years of collaboration with DRAC Pays de la Loire

Johann Leclercq is the IT manager at the Regional Cultural Affairs Department (DRAC) of Pays de la Loire, and for the past 10 years, he has been working with Tranquil IT.

The starting point : Virtualization

« In a 22-year career as an IT manager, it is rare to find a company that is so successful and economically valuable. »

It started back in 2008 with a call to implement virtualization on its 5 sites. Two respondents, one winner, Tranquil IT. « Vincent and Denis Cardon take the time to listen to the problem,” recalls Johann. They answer on lambda hardware, propose a virtualization solution and explain the advantages and disadvantages. The solution was cheaper than the competitor’s, and the overall performance seemed better. ». This is how 10 years of collaboration with Johann and DRAC Pays de la Loire began.

Software deployment for DRAC

« On a daily basis they are reactive on problem solving, they are always listening and often beyond the strict order. Every time I have a problem, my first thought now is to call Tranquil IT Systems to find out if they have a solution. »

Johann had another very time-consuming problem: the installation of software on workstations « and especially updates». At Tranquil IT, we had already developed a software solution to address this issue: WAPT.

« At the time, at the departmental level, it was mainly the OCS and GLPI pair that was used. I chipped my teeth a little bit on that, I had used money to make this solution work but it didn’t work. I could see it was wading through ».

Johann therefore chose to trust us a second time by testing WAPT, the equivalent of apt-get for Windows for DRAC Pays de la Loire. He concluded in a few months that “even the first versions of WAPT already responded to what the other solution did not even do after two – three years ». Safety issues have arisen, but today with CSPN Johann is no longer worried about what his management might tell him. ” If ANSSI has validated the product it is unstoppable ».

OS Deployment

« I must meet my targets with the minimum amount of time possible. I try to optimize my time as much as possible ».

Johann is the only one to manage the IT department of the DRAC Pays de la Loire. He therefore needs effective tools. « If the return on investment is not worth it, I might have enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t have done any better” he admits about the tools offered by the central IT department of the Ministry of Culture. Gradually, we provided him with the tools best suited to his work, to enable him to work more efficiently. For his workstation installation, we offered him Foreman, who performs his Windows 7 installations « in 10 minutes or 15 minutes ». Johann told him, he can’t afford to spend 3 hours installing a windows 7

Samba3 Samba-AD migration

In 2014 Samba3-NT4 became obsolete with the Samba-AD release. It was therefore necessary to migrate the DRAC Pays de la Loire, which had a heterogeneous infrastructure with servers in Samba3 and servers in Windows. We took the opportunity to unify the domain, and move everything to Samba Active Directory. We used WAPT to automate the domain migration. “It worked so well that Paris chose Tranquil IT to do the deployments of all its sites”. Indeed, following the migration project of the DRAC Pays de la Loire, the central IT department of the Ministry of Culture retained us to migrate and merge all its DRACs, its Central Administration and secondary sites (170 sites) into Samba Active Directory. Today we work daily with Johann to assist him in the management of his fleet.

« So far, I have no complaints against Tranquil IT Systems. Yet I know I’m very demanding ».