City of Stratford
City of Stratford Brings Down the Curtain on its Legacy System with Server Upgrade
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Company Overview
It was the winter of 1829 when the Canada Company’s William “Tiger” Dunlop planted his surveyor’s stakes to mark the area that was to become the City of Stratford. What began as a furniture manufacturing centre and railway junction has since grown into one of Canada’s premier cultural destinations. Stratford has set standards in live theatre with its main tourist attraction, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. The summer-long series of productions draws over 500,000 people to the city each year.
Business Challenge
The Corporation of the City of Stratford, however, does business differently than a private organization. As a municipality, the city is accountable to taxpayers for every action it takes and every dollar it spends. The IT division in particular runs especially lean, investing in new technologies only when deemed necessary.
However, in 2004 the demise of the city’s Windows® NT 4.0 Server and Exchange 5.5 technology was beginning to unfold, compelling Stratford to refresh its IT environment. A lack of support for the aging legacy system and security concerns prompted city officials to consider upgrading to new technology.
“The Windows NT product had served us well in the past, but it was time to bring our IT environment up to the current standard,” says Ron Roy, Manager Information Technology Services, The Corporation of the City of Stratford. “Although our virus software worked perfectly, we lacked proper spam protection. Plus, we wanted some of the more advanced e-mail features, such as Web mail service.”
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Solution
In 2005, the city initiated an RFP process to find a service provider to help it upgrade its Microsoft® Windows and Exchange infrastructure. After reviewing a number of submissions, Stratford enlisted the aid of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Metafore IT Solutions.
The First Phase Begins
The migration was completed in two phases. During the first phase, Metafore implemented Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 with Active Directory® directory service, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. “Because we have an IT department of only four people, everyone needs to know everything,” says Roy. “With Active Directory, we manage everything from one console. It has simplified administration significantly, no doubt about it.”
Metafore also installed Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, the virtual machine designed to run on Windows Server 2003 operating system, both of which are part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. With Virtual Server 2005, the municipality can run multiple workloads on fewer servers, resulting in greater hardware efficiency and server consolidation.
“Virtual Server 2005 lets us combine three servers into one, which has helped us define a better disaster recovery plan in the event of hardware failures,” says Roy. “We configured two auxiliary servers as redundant servers under failure situations. That way if our primary server fails we can get services up and running in no time.”
As well, Windows Software Update Service (WSUS), the patch and update component of Windows Server, was deployed on Virtual Server 2005 as an initial patch management solution. WSUS helps the city’s IT administrator to quickly deploy updates to the 225 computers in the network.
The Demise of Exchange 5.5 and Windows NT Server 4.0
The second phase saw the removal of Exchange 5.5 and Windows NT Server 4.0. Exchange 5.5 remained online during the deployment as a back-up system to Exchange Server 2003, in the event of a configuration failure. Thanks to this redundancy users experienced only 15 minutes of downtime during the two-week rollout.
“We completed all work during regular business hours and the migration was completely transparent to users,” says Bill Durham, Senior Consulting Systems Engineer, Metafore. “We actually kept the old Exchange system online until the end of Phase 2 to redirect users to the new system, which minimized downtime during the implementation.”
The Next Step
The city has plans for greater mobility on the horizon. During the migration to Exchange Server 2003, Metafore introduced Internet Security Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 as the Internet Web proxy, along with anti-spam filtering. As part of the deployment, Metafore also published Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) and Microsoft ActiveSync® technology on the ISA Server. ActiveSync allows mobile users to access information from Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client, Office documents, and desktop applications on their smartphones.
“We published all of the features of Exchange 2003 onto the ISA Server so that city workers can get true mobility out of the Exchange Server in a more secure manner” says Durham. “The city is now testing the mobility features of Exchange Server 2003 with a small pool of smartphone users.”
Business Benefits
Like most government agencies, the City of Stratford is continually looking for ways to stretch its resources. With the Exchange-Windows Server migration coming in under budget, the city was able to invest in the Virtual Server and additional training on Active Directory. Since deploying Virtual Server 2005, the City of Stratford trimmed its server count, distributing multiple workloads onto fewer servers. The city no longer needs to invest in additional hardware as a result.
“You can’t buy a server for only 10 users – that would be a waste of hardware,” says Roy. “Virtual Server 2005 has enabled us to reallocate hardware, which eliminated the need for two additional servers. We saw an immediate cost savings.”
No admission for viruses and hackers
With ISA Server 2004, the city’s mobile workers have secure access to Outlook® Web Access (OWA) 2003. This firewall examines encrypted data before it reaches the Web server, and verifies whether the traffic is what it claims to be.
“In the past, only users who were setup with dial-up or VPN services could work remotely, whereas now all staff can use a Web browser from anywhere to securely access email; even from an Airport computer kiosk,” says Durham. “This offers the city an immediate cost savings, and users can be more flexible in the way they work.”
No need for additional transition training
The transition to Exchange Server 2003 was a smooth process. According to Roy, none of the city’s employees required training since they were already familiar with the e-mail system.
“Employees had no idea we had revamped the entire system behind the scenes. People turned on their computers and still received their e-mail. The switch has been extremely transparent,” says Roy.
Staging a better disaster recovery plan
Business continuity is top of mind these days, and the City of Stratford wanted to implement a disaster recovery plan to protect against data and functionality loss due to hardware failures. Virtual Server 2005 has allowed the municipality to create redundant servers in the event of failure situations. The city believes in actively testing its disaster recovery plans, and IT staff is now able to perform regular mock recoveries with its virtual servers.
“With Virtual Server 2005, the dump, the copy and the reconfiguration of the system takes less than an hour. It’s absolutely phenomenal how quick and easy it is to test our recovery plan,” says Roy.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft® Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
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 who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. 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 Metafore products and services, call 1-877-638-2367 or visit the Web site at: www.metafore.ca
For more information about City of Stratford products and services, call 1-800-561-SWAN (7926) or visit the Web site at: www.city.stratford.on.ca
Listen to an audio file of Ron Roy, Manager Information Technology Services, City of Stratford discussing the project. WMA | MP3
