Microsoft/Hosted Exchange Case Study

The Customer - The customer is a medium sized business with national coverage based in Birmingham, Slough and Amsterdam who supply voice and data systems to the private and public sectors

The Challenge – To provide a hosted E-mail system for re-sale to its customers which would provide a highly available and resilient hosted model with the latest versions of Client and Server software to be able to host up to 2000 users.

The Solution – The provision of a Microsoft Exchange cluster on IBM Servers and SAN technology provided the underlying infrastructure for a highly resilient platform. The hardware was installed into the Keytech hosting centre in Manchester which provides an enterprise environment for security, cooling and power requirements for the mail system. The perimeter protection is carried out by a Checkpoint Firewall with mail scanning carried out by a best of breed Cisco Ironport device. Mobile users were also supported through Windows Mobile and the integration of a Blackberry Enterprise Server into the Microsoft Exchange solution.