Case Study

Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council

Sector
Government
Services
IT Support
Solution
DR, Pen Testing
Platform
MS Exchange, KEMP Load Master

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

Testimonial
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, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council