Customer Stories

City of Baton Rouge

Date : 8/1/2010
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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, United States

Challenge
The city government of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, needed to simultaneously improve its disaster recovery process and increase the amount of storage capacity available for Microsoft® Exchange Server and other core applications.
Solution
Rather than adding disks to its legacy storage devices, the city rolled out a Microsoft Exchange upgrade on a cluster of new Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, supported by a Dell/EMC storage area network (SAN). Now the Exchange database is replicated continuously between two physical locations, improving the city's recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for messaging systems.
Benefits
  • 48-fold faster RTO for email (30 minutes instead of 24 hours)
  • Zero data loss for email instead of 1 week RPO previously
  • No downtime in eight months
  • Eight-fold increase in maximum storage capacity (56TB to 480TB)
  • Flexible to use either Fibre Channel or Internet SCSI (iSCSI)
  • Faster software deployment with Dell Services for four months