East Renfrewshire Council - Well Managed Infrastructure
Situation
East Renfrewshire Council is a local authority responsible for administering local government services in a region of approximately 67 square miles to the south of the city of Glasgow. The Council employs a corporate network servicing approximately 1,500 staff members in numerous local offices.
The Council IT department needed to upgrade their existing Exchange 5.5 environment to Exchange 2003, allowing for a period of co-existence between the two systems, ensuring a phased migration approach with minimal impact to end users.
Of particular interest to the Council was the possibility of leveraging new features available in Exchange 2003 to provide more flexible storage, better availability and faster recovery in various disaster scenarios. They particularly wanted to explore the option of using an existing SAN for Exchange storage and the ramifications in doing so.
Charteris Role
- Design a new Exchange 2003 messaging solution to meet the Council’s storage, availability and DR requirements.
- Produce a co-existence and Migration plan to migrate from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 with minimal impact to the end-users.
- Deliver Proof-of-Concept lab exercises to illustrate migration and DR procedures.
Solution
Working closely with the in-house team, Charteris produced an Exchange 2003 design and delivered test lab proof-of-concept exercises with the following benefits:
- Variable service levels (mailbox storage, mailbox recovery and mail item recovery) for different mailbox user categories.
- Detailed Exchange disk I/O estimates to ensure that the corporate SAN would provide a suitable storage model.
- Redundant SMTP connectivity for better mail service availability.
- A fast recovery procedure for ‘dial tone’ mail service in the event of a mailbox database outage.
- DR procedures for server outage and data centre outage scenarios.
- Detailed co-existence and phased migration strategy ensuring minimum end-user disruption.