Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council
Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, in the West Midlands, is one of the top performing local authorities in the country according to the Audit Commission. The top rating status reflects the council’s excellent adult social care and housing service, its children’s services and the progress it has made in regeneration, with ambitious plans for millions of pounds worth of investment across the borough.
Challenge
The Council was looking to upgrade its Microsoft Exchange environment. The IT team at Dudley MBC were also aware that the upgrade would require a dedicated Microsoft©-approved load balancer to do this. They were searching for a solution that was easy to manage, especially since their team would be maintaining the server estate and load balancers in the future.
Solution
Following an important due diligence and assessment process, the Council selected:
- 2x KEMP LoadMaster 3600s in a HA configuration
- KEMP LoadMaster load balancers
- 5,000 Dudley MBC staff mailbox users supported in the new environment
- Added group and resource mailboxes
Result
According to the IT team at the Council, the KEMP solution is:
- Simpler to set-up, configure, and understand than a competitor product
- Significantly more cost-effective than the same competitor
- Highly-available and allows to DR testing with minimal downtime
They were always efficient at getting back to us with answers to any questions we had and proposed a final design that included 24/7 premium support for the KEMP devices. It was very successful. We were quoted for two days on-site and this is all that was needed. In fact, it is one of the few systems we have implemented that has gone in without any issues and we have not had any problems since the install.
Matthew Ridley Senior Technical Officer
