Midmarket Manufacturer Selects everRun® for Affordable Exchange Availability
THE COMPANY
With 370 employees, Hannover, Germany based LPKF is a leading manufacturer of laser systems for use in the production of electronics fabrication, solar cells, medical technology and automobiles.
THE SITUATION
The company relies on email as the backbone of the communication system. And since LPKF's laser systems are used worldwide, the mail server need to be always on and protected against data loss.
LPKF was looking to upgrade its Microsoft Exchange server and wanted to ensure the new server was secure, highly available and affordable.
Three important specifications for the new solution were:
- The transfer of the existing Microsoft Exchange 2003 installation into a virtualised environment
- High availability of Exchange via a redundant system
- An easily manageable environment with automatic failover
"We were looking for a server consolidation solution that was affordable and didn't require many resources so that we could run more applications on one server parallel to each other. To ensure that the issue of single point of failure for all applications on a physical server doesn't occur, we were keen to use a solution that offered us automated failover," says Benjamin Busjahn, head of IT at LPKF.
Virtualisation specialist BEL NET recommended the installation of a Citrix XenServerTM with Marathon's everRun®.
THE SOLUTION
Virtualisation had been on the agenda at LPKF for a while. However, the Head of IT believed that previous virtualisation solutions were simply too complex, expensive and time consuming to implement. Benjamin Busjahn appreciated BEL NET's suggestion of Marathon's everRun, as it offered an affordable solution that provides both virtualisation and high availability.
The everRun environment is easy to manage. Administrative functions, such as updates of servers for example, are actually less complex and easier to address than the previous physical environment.
everRun was installed with Citrix XenServer, resulting in a redundant, high availability and disaster recovery virtualisation solution. The virtual servers have been allocated with automatic,
synchronised mirroring of the entire I/O (RAM, disc and network) of the individual hosts.
The servers are located in two separate data centres and are connected by two redundant network connections. This ensures that any external influences such as water, fire damage or burglaries can't affect all the servers at the same time.
THE RESULTS
"When a new complex system has to be installed there are often issues. We expect from a good reseller that they address any issues swiftly and are reliable, which BEL NET did very well," explains Benjamin Busjahn.
The quick support, the excellent quality of the services and the fact that LPKF was able to fully trust BEL NET, particularly regarding data protection, are some of the most important requirements for a customer and their partner.
The installation of the new environment didn't cause any disruption to LPKF users, as it was completed over a weekend. Even though email traffic has tripled in the last few years, their Exchange server performs better than ever before following the installation of everRun.
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