Baton Rouge accelerates disaster recovery for messaging systems 48-fold with Microsoft Exchange Server cluster on Dell/EMC SANs

Benefits

• 48-foldfasterRTOforemail(30minutesvs.24hours)

• Zerodatalossforemailvs.1weekRPOpreviously

• Nodowntimein8months

• 8-foldincreaseinmaximumstoragecapacity(56TBto480TB)

• FlexibilitytouseeitherFibreChanneloriSCSI

• 4monthsfastersoftwaredeploymentwithDellservices

• Backup/Recovery/Archiving• Clustering• DatabaseManagement/Utilities• Messaging• Services

“ Our users expect that when they come in, their email will be up. We rest easier now, because we know that our Exchange system will meet those expectations.” Eric Romero, Database Manager, City of Baton Rouge

CustomerProfile

Company: CityofBatonRouge

Industry: Government

Country: UnitedStates

Employees: 4,000

Web: www.brgov.com

BusinessNeedThecitygovernmentofBatonRouge,Louisiana,neededtosimultaneouslyimproveitsdisasterrecoveryprocessandincreasetheamountofstoragecapacityavailableforMicrosoft®ExchangeServerandothercoreapplications.

SolutionRatherthanaddingdiskstoitslegacystoragedevices,thecityrolledoutaMicrosoftExchangeupgradeonaclusterofnewDell™PowerEdge™servers,supportedbyaDell/EMCSAN.NowtheExchangedatabaseisreplicatedcontinuouslybetweentwophysicallocations,improvingthecity’srecoverytimeobjective(RTO)andrecoverypointobjective(RPO)formessagingsystems.

“Hurricane Katrina opened the eyes of a lot of IT managers about how important disaster recovery is,” says Eric Romero, database manager for the City of Baton Rouge. “We were already working on improving our disaster recovery processes before Katrina hit, but after Katrina we made that even more of a priority. We just can’t afford downtime of the city’s major IT systems.”

Preparingfordisaster

Microsoft Exchange Server is one of the applications that the city’s 4,000 employees depend on as they provide services to the people of Baton Rouge. The city’s different agencies use the 40-person central IT staff for different levels of support, but most get their email through the central Microsoft Exchange system.

Until recently, data for the city’s Exchange Server 2003 system, along with many other applications, resided on two Dell/EMC CX400 SANs. The Exchange servers were clustered for high availability, but disaster recovery was a concern. “Our only disaster recovery process was that we would do nightly backups to tape and move the tapes to a different facility once a week,” explains Romero. “Katrina heightened our awareness of the risks that we faced with this approach. We didn’t want to get into a situation where we lost the data center and had to dig up tapes that were a week old to try to get email back up for our end users. We began exploring our options for replicating Exchange data to other sites to improve our recovery time and recovery point objectives.”

At the same time, the CX400-series storage devices were facing space constraints. “We were getting close to

capacity on the Exchange database, and we didn’t have any additional storage to give to the Exchange server,” Romero says. The city could have added more storage space to the SANs, but their expansion was limited. “We knew we had to upgrade the SANs soon anyway, so we decided to purchase new SANs rather than adding storage to the CX400 devices,” says Romero.

Newsystems,nolearningcurves

Baton Rouge has used Dell servers for 13 years and Dell/EMC storage solutions for 9 years, so new Dell/EMC

Whether or not they realize it, hundreds of thousands of people rely on the IT systems of the city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a daily basis. A large-scale system failure could have dire consequences for the community’s emergency medical services, 911 operators, and police and sheriff’s departments. And the likelihood of disaster is greater for Baton Rouge than for many cities because it sits at the end of Hurricane Alley, about 60 miles from New Orleans.

“ We have a high level of comfort with Dell and a very good relationship with their technical staff. Everything pointed us toward Dell storage.” Eric Romero, Database Manager, City of Baton Rouge

Technology at Work

Services

Dell™Configuration&DeploymentServices

DellSupportServices

Hardware

DellPowerEdge™R710serverswithIntel®Xeon®5500seriesprocessors

DellPowerEdge6850serverswithIntelXeon7100seriesprocessors

DellPowerVault™ML6000tapelibrary

Dell/EMCCX4-120storagearrays

Dell/EMCCX400storagearrays

Software

Microsoft®ExchangeServer2007

Oracle®RealApplicationClusters(RAC)10gRelease2

RedHat®EnterpriseLinux®

WindowsServer®2008and2003

SANs seemed a natural fit to replace the older devices. “We have a high level of comfort with Dell and a very good relationship with their technical staff,” says Romero. “Whenever we have an issue, they resolve it quickly. Plus, our IT staff is already familiar with Dell and EMC. We know how to run these products, so we knew we wouldn’t face a steep learning curve. The price was right, too. Everything pointed us toward Dell storage for this project.”

The city upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, on Windows Server 2008, and deployed six Dell PowerEdge R710 servers to run the email system. For storage, Baton Rouge installed two Dell CX4-120 SANs. The PowerEdge R710 servers run in a cluster, supported by one of the SANs, in the city’s primary data center. The other CX4-120 SAN resides in the city’s secondary data center. Data is copied from the primary storage device to the secondary device via cluster continuous replication (CCR), a high availability feature of Exchange Server 2007 that combines asynchronous log shipping with failover and management features. As an additional precautionary measure, a Dell PowerVault ML6000 tape library backs up the Exchange data to tape every night.

Dell Configuration & Deployment Services installed Exchange and helped with the data migration from the CX400-series SANs. “The Dell consultants were extremely knowledgeable regarding configuration of both the hardware and Exchange Server,” says Romero. “The City of Baton Rouge wouldn’t attempt to deploy the hardware portion of a project like this. We could have deployed the Exchange portion, but we estimate the project would have taken us four months longer if we hadn’t had the assistance of the Dell consultants.”

Exchange was just the first application to transition to the CX4-120 SANs. Eventually everything on the legacy SANs will migrate to the new CX4-120 devices, including the Oracle RAC 10g R2 databases that underlie the city’s systems for storing 911 records, citizen complaints, jail information, accident reporting and more; the databases run

on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers.

48-foldfasterdisasterrecovery

Previously, in the event of disaster at Baton Rouge’s primary data center, bringing an Exchange-based server online at a secondary location would have required a several-step process. The first step would have been finding hardware to run Exchange Server 2003, with adequate storage for the Exchange database and with connectivity to a tape drive that could read the backup tapes.

“This, in itself, was a problem,” says Romero. “Our Exchange database was 400 gigabytes, and we didn’t have a single server just sitting around that had 400 gigabytes of storage space. There’s no way of knowing how long we would have taken to find hardware to run Exchange if our primary data center had disappeared.”

Even after finding an adequate server and storage device, IT staff would have needed a full day to deploy and configure Exchange, then restore the database from tape. This would have been a painful delay for city staff facing an emergency situation.

That’s why Romero is thrilled with the current disaster recovery environment. “We’ve reduced the time we need to get Microsoft Exchange Server running in a second location from 24-plus hours to less than 30 minutes,” he says. “Now our Exchange data is continuously replicated to the secondary data center. If the primary data center goes away, we have to run a few shell commands to stand up the secondary Exchange server and make one minor configuration change, then Exchange is available with all the data up to the point of the primary data center’s failure.”

Nodowntimefor8months

Fortunately, the disaster recovery preparations have not been put to the test in a real-world situation because Baton Rouge has never lost its primary data center. Before the upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, the city’s messaging environment was fairly stable, but it did experience downtime occasionally. In one instance, a software glitch led to unscheduled

“ We’ve reduced the time we need to get Microsoft Exchange Server running in a second location from 24-plus hours to less than 30 minutes.” Eric Romero, Database Manager, City of Baton Rouge

downtime of around eight hours. Since Exchange Server 2007 went live eight months ago, the city has experienced no disruptions at all.

“Exchange Server 2007 has some good recovery features built in,” explains Romero. “We don’t do this often, but if we need to restore an email that someone deleted, we can find the tape backup from the day in question, restore the entire Exchange database from that day and retrieve the required email—all while the live Exchange database continues to function normally. Running two Exchange databases simultaneously consumes a lot of storage space, but it’s no problem for our Dell/EMC CX4-120 SAN.”

Unlike the CX400 SANs, the CX4-120 SAN can accommodate more than enough disks for the city’s requirements. “We can easily add as much storage as we need,” Romero says. Each CX4-120 can hold up to

240 terabytes of storage, an eight-fold increase in maximum capacity compared with the CX400 SANs.

The CX4-120 also supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity for increased flexibility. “In our current environment, the SANs are connected via Fibre Channel,” says Romero, “but iSCSI would give us cheaper access to more storage in the long run. We may eventually want to use iSCSI, so we appreciate the flexibility that the CX4-120 offers.”

Ultimately, the new messaging server configuration lets Romero and his colleagues sleep better at night. “Our IT managers take comfort in knowing that we have our Exchange server replicated,” Romero says. “Our users expect that when they come in, their email will be up, regardless of what’s going on around them. We rest easier now, because we know that our Exchange system will meet those expectations.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit: dell.com/servicedescriptions

© August 2010. Intel and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. Microsoft and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. DELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. Reference number: 10008574

View all Dell case studies at: dell.com/casestudies