Unisys is implementing one of the largest Microsoft Exchange projects in Austria to date at iT-Austria, the IT service provider for BA-CA, Erste Bank and the Austrian savings banks.
By the first quarter 2004, 12 000 of the company`s mailboxes - to be expanded to 17 000 in a future development - will be centrally administered in a failure-proof system on two Unisys ES7000 servers. Unisys was chosen due to the guaranteed availability and efficient cost management it could provide to the customer with its ES7000 servers.
"The Unisys ES7000 fulfils our core requirements exactly: maximum reliability and efficient cost management," says Wolfgang Heichinger, project manager at iT-Austria. "We can now guarantee our customers and employees system availability for their e-mail applications of less than one hour planned downtime per year."
Alexander Schwarz, Unisys project manager, says: "The cost savings primarily resulted from the consolidation of many different servers to just two Unisys ES7000 servers. The servers are located at different sites and the mailboxes are mirrored from one site to the other. This guarantees that all services can be restored within minutes and made available to the users, even in the event of a disaster."
As a result of the reduced administrative effort and the efficient cost and security management, iT-Austria was able to reduce the total cost of ownership substantially. "The cluster solution was designed together with Unisys in such a way that it allows optimum capacity for further growth and thus safeguards our investment," says Heichinger.
The solution represents the largest Austrian-certified solution for Microsoft Exchange based on the Windows Datacenter Server operating system. Each ES7000 server accommodates two production clusters and one test cluster. At the same time, the servers are configured across both locations to ensure business continuity.
Zak Mesnard from Unisys Africa says any unplanned downtime can be too much. "Building a business continuity framework is a step-by-step process. It starts with platform integrity - eliminating any single point of failure in the server, switch, or storage," says Mesnard.
The Unisys ES7000 is based on Unisys proprietary Cellular Multi Processing (CMP) technology. It allows multiple processes and operating systems to run simultaneously on a single server, comparable to a "server within a server" concept.
Unisys implemented this project together with specialists from Microsoft, iT-Austria and mii (marcus izmir informationsmanagement) ag.
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