With staff operating from its Head Office in Harrow, five regional offices and 80+ project
sites in the UK, along with nine mainland Europe offices and 40+ construction sites, Bovis Lend Lease needed to centralise its corporate email by upgrading from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 and manage the Head Office data life cycle.

Servo advised Bovis Lend Lease on how to not only manage data in its raw form, but also to examine the company’s data life cycle. As the business has grown, Bovis Lend Lease has found that the complexity of managing the distributed Exchange 5.5 infrastructure required centralisation as the number of project sites continued to increase. This distributed approach resulted in not only high administration overheads but it also became difficult to maintain server availability and data protection to meet business and compliance requirements.

The second issue to face Bovis Lend Lease in Harrow was the management of information, as each construction project the company works on generates thousands of documents, from CAD drawings and Word documents through to project specifications. Access and availability to these documents is vital to the company’s project managers, site teams and legal departments for ongoing contract management.

Working closely with the Lend Lease EMEA ICT staff, Servo took responsibility for the
technology requirements, involving the design and implementation of the centralised control corporate information flow that was appropriate for Lend Leases’ core business requirements.

Moving On Up
With the volume of Bovis Lend Lease’s project work intensifying year on year, the company needed to migrate from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. John Cox, Head of ICT Services for Lend Lease EMEA describes how the company had begun to experience problems managing office email and says the decision to migrate led to a review of the company’s existing SAN capabilities and further research into the feasibility of a SAN upgrade in order to accommodate this.

“Exchange 2003 offered a huge number of advantages from a business point of view,”
explained Cox. “We wanted to centralise the whole region’s email into the Harrow data centre and were looking for something big enough and strong enough to take all the information from our existing base and allow for future expansion.” The company’s first SAN had been purchased three years previously.

“The main challenge was the changing requirements in handling data,” Cox said. “At one time we were concerned only with managing data in its raw form, but now we have to manage a data life cycle. The dramatic increase in paper volume created in recent years was a catalyst for this. For example, each project has its own contract and we needed to store multiple copies of these in a number of locations, including personal drives. So the whole question of archiving, data integrity and how to manage the data life cycle securely and effectively for the long-term needed to be addressed. On one hand, the information had to be readily available for those who needed access to it. On the other,
there was a need to retain data for long periods of time, so in some cases it is desirable to push this out to an offline location.”

Servo implemented an HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 8000 server to provide light touch management to the provision of 8TB of usable storage to a Microsoft Exchange and File Clusters. With VRAID technology, the EVA 8000 gained significant performance by stripping all read and write requests over all available disks. In addition, the virtual disk can be grown online without affecting existing data, allowing you to allocate what is needed today, rather than over allocating to provide storage for the future.

The Way Forward
Servo’s solution focused on providing the centralised infrastructure to enable Bovis Lend Lease to migrate existing Microsoft Exchange 5.5 servers from their 120+ EMEA construction sites. The single high availability Exchange 2003 Cluster with Outlook Web Access server farm has greatly improved data security and significantly reduced management overheads and complexity of maintaining project sites and regional centres.

Servo also recommended ZANTAZ file archiving technology to migrate data automatically to lower cost fibre channel ATA storage in the first instance and then to NAS storage as data access requirements diminish. File retention is only maintained for legal and compliance requirements.

With the roll-out of ZANTAZ Email Archiving Solution (EAS), the Exchange Information Store is scalable and improves storage efficiencies by compressing archived data and removing duplicated mail from the numerous Exchange servers on the network through Single Instance Storage (SIS).

Based on a Microsoft Infrastructure, EAS leaves a ‘stub’ or shortcuts in place of the original file or email, ensuring the retrieval of the data is seamless to users. Archiving of data is policy driven, based on age or size, but not limited to these criteria. Once data is archived, ZANTAZ Storage Retention Manager provides the management of the archived data, allowing data to be migrated to NAS devices or replicated off-site to a disaster recovery site.

Bovis Lend Lease has made considerable cost savings by ensuring SAN technology is better utilised for critical data, while taking advantage of lower cost Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) storage for data that no longer changes and is accessed less frequently. By using ZANTAZ File Archiving Solution (FAS) to move non-active data to lower cost storage, Bovis Lend Lease will be able to ensure SAN storage doesn’t continue to grow, while still providing the highest level of access and availability.

Cox says that the team was unfamiliar with the product at the time. “It created a bit of a stir globally because of this, but we were greatly impressed with how the product looked in the box. In practice, it offered a number of advantages to our way of working. We wanted something that was scalable and that wouldn’t become redundant after two or three years. That is why we opted for a top of the range product that would give us the expandability we were looking for. With this project, Servo has equipped us well to successfully meet our future storage demands in the years to come”.

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