A major industrial house wanted to establish a state of the art data center for providing web hosting and managed services. Reliability and stability were the key words, as their customer data was to be hosted on these servers. Even a small downtime would cost them heavily in terms of revenue.

A state of the art infrastructure was available, including rack mounted servers, with redundant data links, power supply and even air conditioning systems. Enterprise versions of major operating systems were installed on the servers, specifically optimized for web hosting and web applications. Security was given paramount importance, as these systems would be exposed to the internet. The operating systems were hardened, and put behind firewalls in order to secure them from any possible attacks from the Internet. Features such as RAID and share storage were implemented, to provide the highest possible levels of availability.

An IT solutions provider, with operations across multiple locations worldwide, wanted to deploy an enterprise class messaging and collaboration solution that would enable speedy flow of information within locations, as well as between locations.

Keeping in mind the key customer requirements, i.e., retain existing Internet facing mail server, while enabling collaboration and workflow within and between multiple locations, a suitable architecture was designed and implemented. First of all, a robust directory services infrastructure was designed, with replication between locations. An enterprise class mail server was deployed at each of these locations, with functionality for messaging, collaboration, calendaring and workflow. These mail servers were designed to communicate with each other, as well as fetch messages from the Internet facing mail server. Permissions and users were created and configured for maximum performance and security. All this work was accomplished by remotely logging on to the networks using VPN connectivity, which reduced IT support costs dramatically for the organization, while ensuring that they had a leading edge solution.