Wicker oversaw a major integration project to standardize the computing and network environment, which included the addition of a SAN (storage-area network) at the company's main data center in Richardson, Texas, at an MCI collocation facility.

The primary appeal of the SAN was redundancy to keep business on track at the fast-paced delivery service, which has clients in the aerospace, banking, health-care, office products and technology fields. Dynamex, which generates about $1 million in revenue each business day, needed the SAN to ensure its uptime. But it also needed a way to replicate its dispatch, delivery and other data in case of an outage or disaster, so it could still keep its foot, bike, car and truck couriers online. So Dynamex is constructing a replica of its network -- servers, SAN and all -- at a new site in Dallas that will mirror the company's network in Richardson. "It's extremely important for us to have maximized uptime 100 percent of the time," Wicker says. "When our response time suffers, our customers may take their delivery needs to the competition."

Dynamex won't use its frame relay WAN as the transport between the Richardson and Dallas sites, which are about 10 miles apart. Instead it will employ an IP-based connection of some sort, possibly a MAN (metropolitan area network), connecting the two sites with Fibre Channel-IP gateways. "Frame relay doesn't provide enough bandwidth. We're looking at leasing fiber and setting up a MAN between the two sites," says Doug King, Dynamex's communications manager.

Fibre Channel was the only game in town when Dynamex selected its SAN over a year ago. But the company plans eventually to opt for the emerging iSCSI SAN technology as a way to further simplify and streamline its network. "The wire-speed IP solutions out there put [the technology] on a level playing field" with Fibre Channel, King says.

The infamous Fibre Channel learning curve wasn't a big deal for Dynamex, according to King, especially since the company hired Dell Professional Services to help configure the SAN and to train the Dynamex IT team. "I come from a heavy Cisco background, and the Fibre Channel switches are straightforward to operate," King says.

One thorny area in the setup of the SAN is making sure all the Fibre Channel-attached devices are registered properly and their drivers loaded when a server is booted up. "There's a certain sequence of events, and you need to make sure the drivers are loaded at the proper stage and registered so that when you boot the server, all the pieces are in place," says King, who notes that the Dell technicians helped walk Dynamex through that process. "That's an area that could generate some frustration" if it's not handled properly, he says.

So far, Dynamex's courier order-processing system, or COPS, and its Microsoft Exchange and backup servers all run on the SAN. The company's Oracle financial and database applications are set to join the SAN in late July, when the Dallas site goes live.

The company's wireless links also provide redundancy for its operations -- at least to its drivers in the field -- with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)-enabled phones, a pager network and plain old radio dispatch for most of its drivers. "If a WAP service goes down, the driver can still get a text message or a direct dispatch," King says. Drivers can select the items they are scheduled to pick up and deliver via the WAP device, and later update the COPS database when the delivery is complete.