Mobitel

Slovenian Mobile Services Provider Eases Administration with New Messaging System

Mobitel, a subsidiary of Telekom Slovenia Group, provides advanced mobile telecommunication services for the Slovenian market. As a company that offers high-quality services at reasonable prices, Mobitel understands how technology helps businesses streamline processes and reduce costs. In its own technology environment, Mobitel had an aging messaging network that was expensive to maintain and cost-prohibitive to grow. After considering an upgrade from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007, Mobitel decided to join the Rapid Deployment Program for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Mobitel was attracted to the solution for its high-availability architecture and range of storage options, but during the pilot it discovered additional benefits. With Exchange Server 2010, Mobitel expects to reduce hardware costs and administration and to offer an improved user experience.

 

Situation

Started in 1991, Telekom Slovenia Group’s mobile subsidiary, Mobitel, has since captured almost 60 percent of the mobile telecommunications market in Slovenia. With approximately 1000 employees, Mobitel offers customers advanced mobile telecommunications services that include telephony, text messaging, data packet transfer, Internet, television, and navigation services.

In its own technology environment, Mobitel relied on the Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 e-mail messaging and collaboration software to support 20 offices and 2000 mailboxes through one main data center. To ensure system reliability and resilience, Mobitel deployed a stretch cluster consisting of two servers at separate locations, which met the company’s needs but was difficult to maintain. For storage, the company relied on an expensive storage area network (SAN) that had become more difficult—and more costly—to manage as e-mail traffic increased. Due to the expense, Mobitel limited the size of users’ mailboxes 80 to 200 megabytes (MB).

In 2009, Mobitel decided to upgrade its messaging infrastructure to gain more advanced capabilities and to streamline administration. It wanted to simplify the technology environment to reduce costs, but it also wanted to ease the burden of administration for its IT messaging team, which consists of only two administrators. Finally, it wanted to offer a more flexible and advanced messaging system, especially for employees with larger mailboxes who frequently encountered performance issues.

Solution

Although Mobitel had considered upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, when the company learned about the latest features offered in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 it decided to join the Rapid Development Program. Mobitel worked with Microsoft Services to design and test its pilot deployment of Exchange Server 2010.

Users will spend much less time searching and categorizing items in their inboxes, which will help them be more productive. Valentin Dominko Head of IT Infrastructure , Mobitel

The Mobitel IT team was most interested in enhanced data replication technologies, which could help simplify administration, and the range of storage options, which would make it possible to choose a cheaper storage solution. In particular, using database availability group (DAG), which combines onsite and offsite data replication into a single, highly available solution that helps prevent downtime, Mobitel will no longer have to rely on the outdated site-resilience configuration of stretch clustering and hardware-based data synchronization. Instead, the company will use three mailbox servers, each with its own copy of the mailbox data, with two servers located in the primary data center and the third at the disaster recovery location. Because it plans to keep three copies of the data, Mobitel will retire its e-mail backup system and instead rely on built-in redundancy in Exchange Server 2010 when it needs to restore data.

Mobitel also plans to reconfigure its data storage. Because Exchange Server 2010 offers a 90 percent reduction in disk input/output (I/O) requirements from Exchange Server 2003 levels, Mobitel will be able to choose from a wider range of storage options. Instead, Mobitel plans to use less-expensive Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard disk drives configured as direct-attached storage (DAS). With a switch to a less-expensive storage environment, Mobitel will be able to increase the size of employee mailboxes to 2 gigabytes (GB).

In terms of administration, Mobitel plans to take advantage of several new and updated features in Exchange Server 2010. For example, administrators will have the ability to move mailboxes between databases without taking users offline, which adds more flexibility to system maintenance schedules and reduces e-mail downtime for employees. The IT team can also use Exchange Management Shell, which utilizes the Windows PowerShell™ 2.0 command line interface, to provide more powerful remote management capabilities and to automate administration tasks such as reporting and regular maintenance.

Further, Mobitel believes that Exchange Server 2010 has several promising features for employees, such as extended browser support for Microsoft Outlook® Web App. “We’re happy that Outlook Web App is now fully supported in Firefox and Safari,” says Dusan Semrov, Messaging Systems Administrator at Mobitel, “because we have several people inside the company, as well as outside contractors, who primarily use those browsers.” When Microsoft Outlook 2010 is released, Mobitel plans to upgrade to offer customers the full suite of features, including conversation view, which enables users to organize and view e-mail messages by conversation topic, and MailTips, which enables users to view critical information, such as out-of-office information or resource conflicts, before sending a message.

Mobitel expects to migrate to Exchange Server 2010 as soon as the production version is available. Valentin Dominko, Head of IT Infrastructure at Mobitel says, “As far as I am concerned, this is a production-ready server. We’ve had no serious issues.” Once Mobitel deploys the new servers, it plans to migrate all users to new mailboxes within three months.

Benefits

As Mobitel begins to roll out Exchange Server 2010, it looks forward to setting up a messaging system that is easier to manage and that provides a much richer user experience than the company’s current solution. “We can see that our decision to deploy Exchange Server 2010 was the correct one. I think we have an excellent solution that provides high availability at a low cost,” explains Dominko.

We definitely will see cost savings in terms of everything connected to system administration. Dusan Semrov Messaging Systems Administrator, Mobitel

Reduced Administration Costs

As part of the deployment of Exchange Server 2010, Mobitel plans to move its servers to one, central location and to automate many manual administration tasks. With DAG, the company expects to substantially reduce operational costs by implementing a high-availability infrastructure that will reduce the time spent performing manual backup and restore tasks. “We definitely will see cost savings in terms of everything connected to system administration in the long run. For example, we expect to see fewer help desk tickets,” adds Semrov.

Mobitel’s IT team sees additional advantages to the simplified, less-expensive configuration of Exchange Server 2010. For example, IT personnel will be able to perform important administration tasks, such as moving mailboxes, with considerably less effort.

Reduced Hardware Costs

Replacing expensive SAN disks with a less-expensive DAS solution will reduce Mobitel’s storage costs over time. “Right now, all copies of our data are on expensive high-end storage. With this pilot, we’ve learned that we don’t need such expensive disks,” says Dominko. Mobitel will also be able to retire its e-mail backup system, which will reduce some overhead costs and save on administration costs as well.

Improved User Experience

Mobitel will also be able to increase the size of employee mailboxes to 2 GB while also increasing the overall performance of the mailboxes. With access to their inboxes from the Outlook desktop client and Outlook Web App using the browser of their choice, the employees will have more flexibility in how they work. Finally, users can take advantage of features like conversation view and faster search capabilities to help them find the information they need more quickly. “Users will spend much less time searching and categorizing items in their inboxes, which will help them be more productive,” says Dominko.

By upgrading from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010, Mobitel plans to deploy a system that will help the company to save both time and money while providing employees with an advanced messaging system they can access from anywhere.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Exchange 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, that combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available.

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

For more information about Microsoft Unified Communications, go to:
www.microsoft.com/uc

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Mobitel products and services, call +386 (0) 1 47 22 255 or visit the Web site at:
www.mobitel.si