The University of Tampa currently enrolls approximately 5000 students, 2500 of which live on campus. Its Department of Information Technology supports the University's server and network infrastructure, including email services for faculty, staff, students and a group of contractual services people.
The IT team at University of Tampa was very concerned about the risk that natural disasters posed to its email systems.
"Our growing concern came after two consecutive summers of frequent hurricane threats, and was punctuated by the devastation that we saw others experience with Hurricane Katrina. We knew it was time to implement a disaster recovery plan," said Jennifer Eason, network administrator. "Our Computer Center, which holds the network and email hardware in a one-story building, is also very close to the banks of the Hillsborough River. That factor only reinforced our desire to find a solution that would ensure all systems would be available in the event our IT infrastructure was put in danger."
The team examined several different ways they could go about implementing a disaster recovery strategy.
"We considered relocating our production system to an alternate site. However, the bandwidth necessary to run production at an alternate site was cost prohibitive," said Eason. "We also checked out the possibility of locating identical hardware at the alternate site and restoring email (to this hardware) after a disaster. However, the downtime necessary to do this, coupled with the potential loss of communication during an emergency, made it an unacceptable solution."
Ultimately the team embarked on a search for a solution that would address all levels of availability requirements, from local Exchange data replication for backup, to local automated failover, to complete wide-area disaster recovery of Exchange at a remote site.
The team considered many different products to replicate email, testing others alongside SteelEye LifeKeeper for Exchange. In addition to the specialized solutions the team also spoke to several infrastructure vendors, including HP, for possible approaches.
"SteelEye was the only product we tested that performed as advertised," said Steve Magriby, director of instructional services for University of Tampa. "SteelEye was the only product of the ones we evaluated that did not corrupt our email system when we forced a typical "problem" situation, such as simulating a network outage or a power outage. SteelEye was one of several products that replicated email but it was the only product that allowed us to control the failover every time. SteelEye was also the only application that we didn't have to continuously reinstall whenever we tried to failover. Other products tended to failover even when we did not intend to do so."
Another important factor in the decision process was the strength of the software vendor's support team. Any prospective solution without support staff in the United States was eliminated from consideration.
UT's disaster site is located approximately 15 miles inland and contains duplicate hardware and software, including a firewall and domain controller in addition to the hardware for Exchange. LifeKeeper for Exchange is installed as a "manual, manual" process so that the software does not attempt failover during any temporary outages, planned or unplanned.
"LifeKeeper was the only software we tested that would allow this Manual/Manual failover. Other vendors said they could do Manual/Manual, but once we set it up according to their tech support folks, it still failed over when we pulled the plug on the primary Exchange server, " said Magriby. "The reason this was so important to us was because we have scheduled network down time every Wednesday and Thursday morning at 5AM. During this down time, our network engineer has the opportunity to turn off the firewall or any switches as necessary to keep his services running. Without the network connectivity between the two servers, the replication software would see it as a disaster and try to fail over to the other server. By allowing us to make this failover a manual process, we don't have to worry about what goes on in the early hours during down time."
Since implementation, the University of Tampa has fortunately not faced any hurricane threats. However, the primary benefit of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Exchange is peace of mind.
"Although we hope we never need to use it, we are confident that, if necessary, we can failover our email system in a very short time to an alternate location and allow our University community to continue using this vehicle as a means of communication when other means of communication may be unavailable," said Eason. "The satisfaction and comfort of knowing that we can continue to communicate with our student body in the event of an emergency is invaluable to an educational institution."
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Photo: One of the legendary minarets at the University of Tampa. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
