The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research across the United States and in several foreign countries. With over 31,000 employees, NIH relies on e-mail as a primary communication tool, particularly for receiving, processing, and awarding grants to medical researchers around the world. NIH wanted to offer a high availability solution across its organization, as well as provide a more seamless e-mail experience for employees. NIH deployed a pilot of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 and found that the architecture and service improvements in this latest version would help the organization improve employees’ e-mail experience, provide a more robust availability and disaster-recovery solution, and ease administration.

Situation

Originally founded in 1887 as the Laboratory of Hygiene at Marine Hospital in Staten Island, New York, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a vital role in advancing biomedical research to improve the health of nations around the world. This division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services employs 31,000 people dedicated to finding what causes diseases and ways to prevent it. Composed of 27 institutes and centers, NIH provides leadership and financial support to researchers across the world. The Center for Information Technology (CIT) centrally supports NIH’s enterprise IT services.

Because NIH funds research grants across the United States and in several foreign countries, it relies on e-mail as a primary communication tool for tasks such as receiving, processing, and awarding grants. NIH’s current messaging environment is built primarily around Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 and supports 38,000 mailboxes in one main data center. To manage servers running Exchange Server, NIH uses the Exchange Management Shell extensively. The Exchange Management Shell, based on the Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface, provides powerful command-line plug-ins that administrators can use to automate management tasks.

One challenge NIH faces is providing high availability and disaster recovery for employees across the organization. Currently, only about 5,000 of its mailboxes are configured for high availability. These are in two clusters deployed with cluster continuous replication, each with 2,500 mailboxes. For disaster recovery, NIH has set up standby continuous replication for each cluster, with data replicated to standby clusters at a remote data center for disaster recovery. For the remaining 33,000 mailboxes, NIH relies primarily on tape backups for system restoration after a major failure or disaster. “Our current contingency plan provides automatic failover and access to data for only a subset of our customers. To bring the messaging services back online for the majority of employees would be an arduous process,” explains Artie Noel, Senior Messaging Engineer at NIH.

Another challenge NIH faces is storage, both at its disaster recovery site and in its production environment. “At our remote data center, storage is at a premium due to space restrictions,” explains Jonathan Thomas, Messaging System Team Lead at NIH. “As the amount of data increases, we would like to seriously consider some type of direct attached storage or external array.” Currently, NIH relies on a storage area network (SAN) solution that is managed by its Facilities team.

Because of the storage constraints, mailbox quotas are set at 200 megabytes, which NIH would like to increase. Many employees rely on Outlook® Data Files (PSTs) on their personal computers to help them manage the size of their mailboxes, but no central policy exists across all of the institutions that make up NIH for managing this data. Some employees store their PST files on network file shares, which can lead to decreased performance of the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client. The agency set up a third-party archiving solution to help maintain current quotas and reduce the need for PST files, but even with archiving, the PST files remained an issue. NIH believes that with larger mailbox quotas it could eliminate PST files and retire the archiving system or use it strictly for eDiscovery.

As NIH considers the future of its messaging environment, it recognizes that it has several opportunities to increase communication capabilities for its employees. For instance, NIH would like to further the interoperation of its messaging solution and its other collaboration tools, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We have about 10,000 employees using Office Communications Server for instant messaging and presence,” says Thomas. “Every day, we get more requests to enable it for workers.”

NIH would also like to support more devices using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® technology across the organization. Currently there are a large number of BlackBerry users at NIH. The BlackBerry devices put a heavy load on Exchange Server and are expensive to operate due to licensing costs and the need for additional servers.

First and foremost, though, NIH would like to provide a more seamless user experience across multiple desktop operating systems and Web browsers. Between 5,000 and 8,000 people within the organization use Macintosh computers. These employees use a variety of e-mail clients, which leads to uneven service and additional help desk calls.

Solution

In September 2009, NIH deployed a pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. NIH quickly determined that Exchange Server 2010 could help it reach several goals for its messaging solution. In particular, it would be able to provide an Outlook experience on the Web through Outlook Web App, no matter if employees are using Windows® Internet Explorer® or another browser. NIH would also be able to provide high availability and disaster recovery across the organization.

Because Exchange Server 2010 has extended browser support for FireFox and Safari, employees using these browsers can access a broad range of capabilities within Outlook Web App. Additionally, Outlook Web App offers instant

We believe that Database Availability Groups will allow us to provide a faster and less painful way to fail mailboxes over to our disaster recovery site. Jonathan Thomas Messaging System Team Lead, National Institutes of Health

messaging and presence capabilities, so employees who use it as their primary e-mail client can take advantage of a Universal Inbox experience. “Outlook Web App will be a fully-functional client for our customers not using Windows. The best part is, no matter where they log in to Outlook Web App, they will have the same experience, and all the functionality they are familiar with,” says Noel.

To extend high availability and disaster recovery to more of its customers, NIH plans to implement Database Availability Groups, which combine on-site and off-site data replication into a single solution and provide an easy way to replicate e-mail to a remote location in order to safeguard the Exchange Server environment against site-level disasters. “We believe that Database Availability Groups will allow us to provide a faster and less painful way to fail mailboxes over to our disaster recovery site,” says Thomas. NIH currently plans to maintain three database copies for each server, with a lagged copy of each database at its remote data center for disaster recovery.

In its primary data center, NIH will continue to use its current SAN solution while it investigates options for increased storage. At its secondary data center, NIH is looking at using direct-attached storage. It also hopes to increase mailbox quotas to one gigabyte, which it thinks will alleviate issues employees face with PST files. The organization may also implement the native archiving capabilities of Exchange Server 2010, if it finds employees need to keep additional data, and relegate its current archiving system to storing only compliance data.

NIH plans to use the enhanced scripting capabilities of Exchange Server 2010 to continue managing tasks through the command line. Improved in Exchange Server 2010, Exchange Management Shell provides additional remote capabilities and restricted runspaces (the operating environment where commands are processed) so that administrators can manage servers running Exchange Server without having to log in to each server.

NIH plans to implement Exchange ActiveSync for employees as an alternative to BlackBerry devices. Mobile devices that run ActiveSync, including Windows phones, maintain a connection with Exchange Server, so they receive any new or updated e-mail, calendar items, contacts, or tasks as soon as they arrive on the server. “We are adding Exchange ActiveSync to augment our mobile e-mail service offering. Because it is built directly into Exchange Server, there are no additional points of failure, servers to manage, or licenses to buy,” explains Noel.

Benefits

New features in the Exchange Server 2010 architecture enable NIH to offer employees a more seamless messaging experience and to provide a more robust solution for high availability and disaster recovery. It will also reduce administration and minimize issues with archiving and network strain due to employees storing PST files.

Improved Employee Experience

Employees will eventually benefit from increased mailbox quotas. They can spend less time managing their mailboxes and working with PST files and more time responding to critical messages. With Outlook Web App, NIH expects employees using computers other than Windows-based machines to have a more seamless experience accessing their e-mail through their Web browsers.

Increased High Availability and Disaster Recovery

By implementing Database Availability Groups, NIH can provide high availability to more of its customers. It can also reduce downtime if a failure occurs. Noel adds, “With our current solution, we have at least six hours before we can begin restoration efforts in the event of a major systems failure. With Database Availability Groups, we think we can significantly reduce that down to a couple of hours—and that would be if we decided not to use automatic failover.”

Eased Administration

Several features in Exchange Server 2010 will help reduce the amount of system administration for NIH. With the improved Exchange Management Shell, NIH can more effectively automate tasks and perform remote management. “The Exchange Management Shell provides an intuitive interface for scripting tasks, which also helps maintain consistency across our messaging platform,” explains Noel. “Being able to invoke a remote shell from my desktop makes administration much easier.”

Using Online Move Mailbox, NIH will ease the transition from Exchange Server 2007 to Exchange Server 2010 for employees and provide seamless service for future mailbox moves. Finally, native support in Exchange Server 2010 for devices with Exchange ActiveSync means lower-impact mailbox moves for the NIH. “Mobile messaging devices can sometimes be impacted during a mailbox move operation, and sometimes cause a service outage for that customer. Our experience has shown that Exchange ActiveSync devices are resilient to these situations,” explains Noel.

By deploying Exchange Server 2010, NIH can provide all of its employees with a consistent messaging environment on a highly-available infrastructure. It can provide improved service and larger mailboxes while still reducing costs.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Exchange Server 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange Server delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, which 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 products and services at the Center for Information Technology at the National Institutes of Health, call (301) 496-6203 or visit the Web site at:
www.cit.nih.gov

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