It’s always nice to share stories of clients who use the technology we have implemented for them, fully to address their business challenges.

George McCann of Regenda Group has done just that, using Microsoft Hyper-V, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager and his NetApp storage solution, to build a business continuity solution for one of their key business applications.

George shared with us the business issue and how he used his technology investment to help address it. “As a Housing group our ability to manage our housing stock and provide an excellent service to our customers is key and our system for delivering that is critical to our ability to operate. As a business we identified that we needed to provide a recovery solution should we ever lose our primary data centre and our housing management system with it”

Regenda Group has multiple sites alongside their main site in Bolton, on e of those is in Liverpool and had been identified as their secondary data centre.

George continued “ we realised the key to this was to utilise our secondary data centre, but also look at how the technology we were using allowed us to do this simply. We currently are using replication technology to have copies of our data sat in the secondary site, we have taken advantage of technology inherent in our applications, such as “site continuous replication” in Exchange 2007 or SnapMirror on our NetApp storage, however the challenge presented by our housing management system was that it didn’t easily offer us this”.

This led George to have to consider how he could take advantage of his existing platforms to add replication and DR functionality to his housing management system “ we had two issues with the system, one was it had no inherent DR capabilities and two, it was running on older hardware, which was going to be difficult to replace if we lost it. Because of this, it seemed an ideal solution to virtualise, initially we had considered VMWare as a mechanism for this, but with the help from our technology partners at Gardner Systems and the close link they have helped us to forge with technology specialist such as Matt McSpirit at Microsoft, we quickly realised that Hyper-V especially alongside Systems Centre Virtual Machine Manager, would be the perfect solution for us”.

George goes on to explain “the mix of technology, from Microsoft and NetApp has allowed us to easily provide a twofold solution, firstly by using VMM’s physical to virtual migration technology, we have been able to easily create a virtual version of our live housing management system, utilising the flexibility of our NetApp storage, we could easily then copy live production data into our isolated DR instance, allowing us to test the solution, without impinging on the production environment. By then placing the Hyper-V virtual machine files onto our NetApp storage, we can then use the SnapMirror functionality to replicate these virtual servers to our DR environment, which we can then easily mount on our DR Hyper-V hosts”.

George plans to enhance this further “by presenting to the production server storage from our NetApp SAN, we will then get our housing management system to put its own system backups there, on completion of this, we will then get the NetApp storage to replicate the data over to our DR site, we can then mount this data on our DR site and import it into the recovered version of our system”

“ it’s great to see our technology investment providing us functionality that we had not even thought about when we deployed it, that really shows how the right technology platform gives you tremendous scope and flexibility for your business to be able to meet new challanges.

One of the biggest challenges we are seeing facing many of our clients is data security, especially in terms of continuity and disaster planning, with many customers now concerned about how they keep their businesses running in the face of a major event affecting the ability to access their key business systems.

To this end a number of our clients had met with us to discuss how we could help them build a continuity model, that in the event that they could not access their normal business premises then how could we help them to implement a solution to allow their businesses to continue

We have just completed a pilot solution with one of those clients to prove just how we can use their technology investment to create such a continuity solution.

As this is a pilot solution and of a sensitive nature, we are not able to share the client’s details with you, however we can share the technology approach and how we have used NetApp storage and virtualisation to give a continuity solution.

The current client setup includes a number of physical servers, providing a number of services, such as email and database facilities, internal storage is delivered using NetApp’s unified storage platform, presenting both user data via NAS and storage to the server infrastructure via a SAN.

The aim was to provide two key components;

· To provide a remote “backup” of their live data both application and user data, which would be no more than 4 hours out of date from the production environment.

· To allow in the event of their main business headquarters been inaccessible to have key business staff setup at Gardner Systems Offices and access a replicated version of their current business environment, including applications and data.

To provide this we were going to take advantage primarily of the NetApp storage they had invested in, using NetApp’s SnapMirror technology, we would be able to replicate their business data to a secondary NetApp storage solution in a secure location, using a simple encrypted connection across the Internet. Utilising NetApp’s snapshot technology and SnapManager application suite, we would be able to take consistent instantaneous backups and replicate them to the secondary storage, without affecting production data.

This alone provided and met the first requirement which was to provide a live disk based “off site” backup of the production data.

The Second challenge was to replicate the production server environment allowing users to access their data and business applications from a secondary location, should their production office no longer be available.

Again we have utilised technology to make this straightforward by taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V server, we were able to build a virtualised replica of the production servers, allowing users to turn up with their laptops, or virtualised desktops if required to allow them to Logon to the system they would normally see in the office.

This allows us to store all of the users physical devices, on a single virtual server, which then only need bringing online for testing, or in the event of an actual continuity incident, reducing the client costs as there is no need to charge them for the maintenance of physical machines.

We have provided them with a per Gb/Pre month cost model for hosting a copy of their data, again removing the investment they would have to make in both owning, hosting and operating their own secondary storage solution.

We are now looking to formalise the procedure and service level agreements with this customer, in what is a very exciting new area for us and providing an invaluable service to Merseyside’s business community.

To find out more about how this pilot has worked and the technology used to do it, contact pauls@gardnersystems.co.uk

Over the last few months Gardner Systems have been working hard with its technology partners evaluating and working with them on new releases , especially with Microsoft, with a new wave of technology, now included in the Microsoft “New Efficiency” campaign.

Our Network Manager Alan Eves said “ we have been so impressed with the quality of the products, but more importantly with the efficiency is running costs and importantly business practices that these new products are bringing to us”

Alan has been involved in transforming a number of the day to day operations at Gardner by heading up a SharePoint roll out across the business, “this has revolutionised the way Gardner interact with not only each other, but also our customers and event attendees”. As part of the new technology migration Gardner are looking to enhance their event management and customer interation further by deploying Microsoft CRM.

Other technology products currently rolling out across the business include;

· Windows 7 on all desks

· Server virtualisation programme, using Microsoft Hyper-V and managed with the System Centre Toolset (Virtual Machine Manger, operations manager and config manager)

· Exchange 2010

· Online Services (integrating on premise solutions with online Exchange, OCS and Live Meeting)

“these technologies are transforming the way we are operating out business, as an example the deployment of Hyper-V R2 is going to greatly reduce the physical server count, reducing both out power and cooling requirements” Alan Added.

Alongside the Microsoft technology, Gardner are also taking advantage of their NetApp storage platform as well, to allow for a hugely efficient delivery mechanism for their new virtualised infrastructure . “The NetApp storage technology is very important in our virtualisation programme, we believe it bar far the most efficient storage technology on the market, with its deduplication and cloning technology, allowing both massive space savings as well as incredibly efficient machine creation, letting us create new Windows servers in a matter of a couple of minutes. Both technologies have positively impacted what we are doing, allowing us to be much more cost and time efficient” Alan Added.

If you want to see more about what Gardner’s are doing, contact Alan to arrange a demo alane@gardnersystems.co.uk

On October the 13th we held a really interesting preview event for around 30 businesses on Exchange 2010, we were lucky to have with us Julian Datta from Microsoft as our key speaker, during the event I tried my best to get down some of the key technology messages presented… so hopefully I got them all here!

What does Exchange 2010 Look to address?

• Communications Overload – How can a new version of Exchange help people to better manage the ever increasing amount of information, how to help people find the right person, right time, right device.
• Globally Distributed Users – How to better manage larger and an evermore distributed base of uses.
• High Cost Of Communications – how to minimise the business costs of communications.
• security and compliance – How can Exchange help companies meet more stringent requirements around their use of Email.
• cloud integration – How can Exchange co-exist with the increasing array of “cloud” services.

 

Technically speaking

What are some of the technical consideration for Exchange 2010?

Can it be Virtualised ? – as you’d expect of any MS product, of course yes is the answer – as with Exchange 2007 however the Unified Messaging Role cannot be, due to the lack of tolerance for any latency.

Memory Requirements ?  – Pretty much the same as those for Exchange 2007, if you want to check in detail then visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346700(EXCHG.140).aspx

Disk Changes ? – Will cover this in a little more detail later, however there are some massive changes to the way disk access and usage has been re-engineered in Exchange 2010 – IOPS requirements are reportedly 70% lower than those in Exchange 2007, allowing the realistic use of S-ATA disks in bigger enterprise solutions with disk performance less important.

Server Roles ? – No change to the server roles from those in 2007 – however one key change, the Client Access Role now also handles the Outlook MAPI connection, these are no longer handled at the Mailbox server role.

Public Folders ? – Public folders still in and supported.

Moving the Exchange Database to SQL server ? – This has been a long term debate and source of rumour, however at the moment there are NO plans to move Exchange database to SQL server – technically no real benefits -  would also leave the Exchange product group to reliant on the SQL group.

Exchange 2010 its 3 pillars

Exchange 2010 has been built on (to coin a Microsoft phrase) 3 Pillars namely;

• Flexible and Reliable
• Anywhere Access
• Protection and Compliance

and these pillars are the fundamentals that Exchange and its feature set are focussed on, so what does this all mean?

Flexible and reliable

The criticality of email is for many organisations now fully recognised and is a key business system, so Exchange 2010 looks to build on the improvements first delivered in Exchange 2007, things like CCR have been taken and made an even more integral part of the 2010 design.

single platform for HA and DR

One of the biggest changes in Exchange 2010 is the complete re-architecture of the way the Exchange databases are deployed.

Historically databases where deployed in storage groups, with transaction logs, these databases could not be natively shipped between servers. Exchange 2007 changed this with the introduction of continuous replication technology, LCR/CCR/SCR this log shipping technology allowed for secondary copies of the Exchange database.

This technique has been taken and supercharged with the introduction of database availability groups (DAG’s) These groups can be spread across upto 16 servers with each server hosting a replica of the production database. In the event of a server failure, the Exchange infrastructure will automatically redirect all client connections to the new “live” server.

Importantly this is seamless to the user and is part of the single platform delivery, with no requirement to worry separately about clustering, Exchange 2010 just delivers this for you.

Another important change is that the Hub and CAS roles can now sit on a HA mailbox server (unlike in 2007 where these roles HAD to be separate) this means that high availability can now be carried out on a minimum of 2 servers, allowing for HA to be made even more affordable in Exchange 2010.

Client Access Server Role

A key component in delivering the HA model, is something that on the face of it seems a basic change. Again historically Outlook (MAPI) clients have always connected directly to the Exchange Mailbox server (or back end server in Exchange 2003), with other clients such as OWA and ActiveSync connecting to the CAS server (or front end in Exchange 2003). a key component to the flexibility of DAG’s is removing the MAPI connectivity from the mailbox servers and rerouting it to the CAS servers, because of this, this allows the databases to move between mailbox servers and for mailbox servers to fail, while the CAS role seamlessly redirects the client to the Live Mailbox.

 

Storage Options

As disk sizes continue to grow, so do users mailboxes, historically Exchange has been very reliant on disk performance to continue to operate in a effective way, however this made it difficult for to take advantage of higher capacity, yet slower performing disk technologies such as S-ATA.

Exchange 2010 has reduced the I/O requirement to disk by around another 70% on top of an already substantial drop seen in Exchange 2007, these further drops allow S-ATA disks to become a realistic deployment option for Exchange.

DAG’s also allow for a less resilient disk technology to be adopted should users feel that they want to deploy on single disk one 1TB S-ATA disk as opposed to using a RAID array!

so because of these changes, this allows users again to potentially see a huge saving in implementation costs of an Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

Anywhere Access

A lot of the changes discussed so far are at an infrastructure level, however some really nice feature additions for the end user client as well. More work has been done to allow users to have Outlook as a single point of all communications – including things like text messaging now been consolidated into Outlook.

some of the following things will only be available in Outlook 2010, however will all also be in OWA, allowing earlier adopters of Exchange to have those features ahead of the appearance of Outlook 2010.

conversation view

really clever feature, came from some work that was developed from the office labs team. Allows all messages that follow a single thread to be grouped in a “conversation view”. Tools like clean up and ignore a conversation thread can certainly help control your mailbox.

voice mail with text preview

one of the additions to the UM functionality is the speech to text conversion from voicemail. The voicemail will sit in your Inbox, Exchange will then do a conversion to text and this will then be displayed in the mail body with the attached VM, it also includes the playback feature, which will allow you to highlight a piece of text and then just play that bit back from the voicemail.

Mail Tips

Mail tips will prewarn you of a users mail status before you click send, for example you want to send an email to Bill but Bill is OOF, then the mailtip will pop up on the Outlook pain to show his OOF status. You can then decide as to whether you click send or not.

 

OWA facilities

In what has become a theme for Exchange releases, the functionality of OWA increases again and no exception with 2010. The “premium” experience will now not just be a IE experience, with Firefox and Safari fully supported.

Another nice touch is all emails in a single pane now, rather than the first 25 on page1, now a scroll bar just like with the full client.

Protection and Compliance

Some nice features here, alongside some that may need the addition of service pack 1 to become fully formed features especially for the enterprise.

The addition of the archive engine is a really useful feature for smaller organisations and those that have no archiving already, if you’ve already invested in an enterprise archiving solution, you are probably not going to throw that away right now, however if you have nothing else in place, archiving can be hugely useful.

The Archive engine currently archives at a mailbox database level, however does NOT pull emails out of the existing mailbox store, they are all kept in the same store, which in the initial release, removes its usefulness as a way of managing mail store size, however what it does add is a whole lot of very useful functionality around compliance.

here’s a quick list of features that it brings;

• removing the reliance for PST – been able to remove the threats that PST files bring to the integrity of a corporate email system, as PST’s allow for both data loss from an organisation and also removes the enterprise admin control over email.
• global archive/compliance search – the ability to search for message threads and content across the entire organisation in the event of needing to meet a compliance mail retrieval request. this will also search archives and deleted emails in association with the correctly defined compliance and retention rules.
• Message archiving now allows archived messages to be seen in OWA, if users use archive PST, then these are no longer available to web client sessions.
• Protection – ability to define protection rules across your Exchange organisation.
  • rule classification – ability to assign global rights management rules at an Exchange level, rather than relying on users implementing them
  • legal hold policy – define policies around retention and the tracking of  changes and deletion of emails
• retention policy – the ability to set mail retention policies

Step in the right direction in terms of compliance rules. However the archive only archiving messages within the same mailbox database, means it doesn’t meet the needs of many archive users, to manage their mailbox database size. The suggestion is this will come with SP1. At the moment looks as though the archiving  is there more to drive the compliance features, rather than as an enterprise archive solution.

Optimised for software and services

One of the most talked about topics in the IT industry at the minute is that of cloud services, this is a huge strategic direction for Microsoft with their own expanding cloud offerings, from online versions of Exchange/SharePoint and OCS…via Azure all the way to Xbox live, Microsoft have a large range of cloud offerings.

Exchange 2010 plays right along with that and is engineered with it in mind, with much closer integration for, what is pretty unique to Microsoft’s view of the cloud world, the mix of on-premise and cloud.

What looks likely to be coming is the ability to manage your online and on-premise exchange via a single console, looking forward to seeing that.

You get full GAL integration shared free/busy information etc…making it a pretty seamless experience. This is a huge differentiator for Microsoft in our opinion, as the likes of Google for example, can’t give you that mixed and integrated solution, preferring the all or nothing approach, which can be off putting for many businesses.

Summary

Appreciate that this is a pretty high level overview, but just wanted to try and share the key points that Julian covered in around 2 1/2 hours.

If you want my information, of course we have Exchange 2010 available in our labs here for you if you want to contact us at microsoft@gardnersystems.co.uk and more than happy to arrange demo labs where appropriate.

 

Of course plenty of stuff on both the general Microsoft web site – http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/default.aspx

and the Exchange team BLOG is always worth a read… http://msexchangeteam.com/

As one of attendees said to me last week… the best version of Exchange by a long way! – high praise indeed!