City of Bonn Achieves "Always On" Exchange with everRun®
THE COMPANY
Bonn was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999.
Starting in 1998, many national government institutions were moved from Bonn to Berlin. Both houses of the German national parliament, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, were moved along with the Chancellery and the residence of German head of state, the Bundespräsident.
But Bonn remains a centre of politics and administration. Roughly half of all government jobs were retained as many government departments remained in Bonn and numerous sub-ministerial level government agencies relocated to the former capital from Berlin and other parts of Germany. In recognition of this, the former capital now holds the title of Federal City ("Bundesstadt").
THE SITUATION
The City of Bonn had been virtualising its Exchange 2003 system on a VMware ESX 3.5-Cluster for some time, providing access to 4,500 email accounts and 2,500 public folders. In August 2009 the Exchange 2003 System was already overloaded due to the number of users and the limited availability of Exchange databases.
Additionally, the City of Bonn was bound to use Outlook 2007 after a planned migration to Exchange 2007 because of regulations. They had been using Outlook 2003, which is unable to automatically recognize a new Exchange Server following a failover of the server, so manual intervention was required on each Outlook client. The auto discover option that comes with Outlook 2007 meant that busy IT administrators no longer need to do this.
THE SOLUTION
By virtualising the Exchange Server with Marathon everRun® on Citrix XenServerTM, the City of Bonn would achieve:
- No manual intervention for individual clients - the host name remains the same
- No double-licensing of Exchange - only one virtual instance and not two parallel systems exist
- All systems are synchronized - without any time delay
The new environment is noticeably better equipped to handle the number of users (designed for 4,500 heavy users / 32GB Ram, 4CPUs, and 9DBs), than the previous Exchange 2003 environment running on VMware (3GB Ram, 4CPUs, 4DBs).
This has greatly improved the user experience when it comes to activities such as searching and sorting within Outlook.
THE RESULTS
Frank Bücher, divisional head of central services / IT systems at the City of Bonn, said: "This new technology also enables us to make our Blackberry Enterprise Server available on the same system, making mobile communication possible for over 300 users, and allows for monitoring of traffic to track
traffic offences."
It's especially important for the public sector to identify effective solutions to ensure high availability and performance. The choice of everRun for the City of Bonn is perfect, as it provides automated
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