NetApp Solutions - Mailbox Exchange Environment with Network Appliance home ) netapp solutions ) mailbox exchange environment with network appliance

The Customer
Arup ( www.arup.com ) is a world-renowned engineering consultancy with global revenues exceeding £400 million. The firm operates out of 73 offices in 32 countries, with 7,000 employees working on projects in 160 countries. Its unrivalled range of technical, design, creative, and management skills has earned the company project awards for the new London Heathrow Terminal 5 and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Prestigious structures in the Arup portfolio include Lloyd's of London and the Sydney Opera House.

The Challenge: Build a Failsafe Exchange Structure While Reducing System Costs and Administration Requirements
How does an engineer at Arup headquarters in London make sure that today's drawing revisions arrive promptly in the hands of a Tokyo-based architect by start of work tomorrow? E-mail, of course. For this international company e-mail is a mission-critical application that connects global project teams, converts time differences into scheduling assets, and provides a running log of business activities.

Martin Cooper , global operations manager at Arup, says that maintaining a rapidly growing e-mail infrastructure based on direct-attached storage (DAS) was increasingly cumbersome. "To support our global headquarters in London, we were maintaining 32 Exchange servers. We were paying for 32 sets of Microsoft® licensing, 32 maintenance contracts, and the administration of 32 individual systems. And reliability was a major issue-our storage was all single-instance, so if a server went down, we lost that Exchange site.

"Unfortunately, a failure occurred at least once every six to nine months, and average recovery time was 18 to 24 hours. On one occasion a corrupted database cost one group ten calendar days of e-mail-with our staffing levels, that's the equivalent of 1,300 days of e-mail. The IT team spent 15 administrative days resolving the issue."

The Solution: Consolidate Exchange 2003 Environment on Network Appliance IP SAN Solution
The first phase of the Exchange project consolidated eight e-mail sites onto a NetApp FAS system. "We migrated that first set of Exchange stores to the NetApp system without a single outage," comments Cooper. "The project was completed on time and 15% under budget."

The next phase involved standardising on the NetApp IP SAN for the remainder of the Exchange 2003 infrastructure at Arup global headquarters. The Arup team replaced the original 32 Exchange DAS servers with two higher-performance Exchange servers configured for diskless boot. At each of two data center sites, an Exchange server supports 1,100 Exchange clients and connects to a NetApp system via iSCSI. Reciprocal mirroring between NetApp systems ensures rapid failover in the event of a site outage.

Today, Arup relies on the NetApp IP SAN solution to support more than 2,200 users and store more than 2TB of Exchange data. The Arup IT team has also consolidated engineering data across 48 Windows® file servers onto NetApp storage.

Business Benefits: 100% Exchange Availability plus Streamlined Management
The Arup Exchange environment has run smoothly for more than two years. "Since we deployed the NetApp solution we have had no outages," reports Cooper. "During simulated failure events, we turn off Exchange on one NetApp system, and Exchange automatically fails over to the NetApp system in another building. Within five minutes we are back up and running."

Cooper notes that there have been occasions to roll back to previous SnapshotT copies of Exchange databases. "We recently completed an Exchange recovery in just 25 minutes-that's compared to the 24 hours that it would have previously taken, assuming that the backup database on tape actually worked. If it didn't, we'd have had to keep going back until we found a good copy. SnapManager® software eliminates that problem entirely by verifying that a database is good before a Snapshot copy is ever made."

Diskless booting off the IP SAN adds flexibility and resiliency to the Exchange structure. Cooper explains, "We have taken the operating system off the front-end server and put it on the NetApp system. If for some reason we lose a live Exchange server, the hot spare boots directly off the NetApp system. There's no performance hit-users would never know there had been a problem. We create Snapshot copies of the operating system the same as our Exchange databases. That way, if we apply a bad patch, or something else goes wrong, we can quickly roll back to a good copy."

As part of its strategy to adhere to corporate best practices for data retention and tamper prevention, Arup leverages NetApp SnapLockT software to permanently secure key Exchange information. The software also allows maximum utilisation of storage resources, allowing a combination of SnapLock and regular storage volumes on the same system.

Exchange management has been notably simplified due to NetApp software tools. For example, Single Mailbox Recovery software replaces an hours-long process that previously required restoration of all mailboxes within a storage group before a single mailbox could be extracted.

The combination of the VERITAS Enterprise Vault archival solution and NetApp NearStore® systems further simplifies management by enabling policy-based migration of data to economical disk-based secondary storage while maintaining fast, searchable, online access to e-mail archives.

Cooper notes that consolidating storage on the NetApp IP SAN solution has significantly reduced costs. "We have achieved major savings in capital, licensing, and tape media costs. We have not had to incur the expense of hardware refreshes and have been able to redeploy many retired DAS servers.

"We also didn't want to invest inordinate amounts of IT staff time to learn about Fibre Channel switches, firmware upgrades, etc." he continues. "We had already implemented VoIP, so we understood TCP/IP very well-it only made sense to leverage existing resources and expertise.

"Perhaps most importantly, our systems administrators can now go home at night instead of working around the clock to support and patch a fragmented DAS infrastructure. We can work smarter, not harder-we want our IT staff to have time to focus on building business solutions, not maintaining mail servers."

Cooper summarises the benefits of NetApp solutions and partnership. "More than any other vendor, NetApp has committed to understanding our business to make sure we have the right solution for the job. NetApp solutions help us deliver on our goal of transparent, dial-tone IT."