Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Ministry Improves File Replication, Trims Two Days of Worker Downtime per Month
Overview
Country or Region:Austria
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
The Austrian Ministry of the Interior is responsible for public safety throughout Austria. The agency’s 35,000 police officers, border control officers, and support staff work from 1,200 offices.
Business Situation
When power or server computer failures interrupted software transmissions from central to branch office servers, the IT staff spent two days rebuilding data, and branch staff lost two days of productivity.
Solution
The ministry deployed Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, which features technologies that simplify and strengthen file replication and management of branch office servers.
Benefits
Two-day-per-month boost in IT and branch staff productivity
Better ability to anticipate storage needs
Conservation of network bandwidth / “With Windows Server 2003 R2, we’ve been able to eliminate two days of lost productivity per month for two to three IT staff members.”
Wolfgang Müller, Project Lead, Austrian Ministry of the Interior
The Austrian Ministry of the Interior provides law enforcement and security services for the people of Austria, managing police and border control and coordinating response to problems such as drug trafficking and terrorism. The ministry has been a model governmental body in its relentless drive to streamline bureaucracy and use technology to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively. After pruning its countrywide server computer holdings from 1,500 to 500 and upgrading those servers to Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 with Service Pack 1, the ministry was poised to take advantage of the file replication efficiencies of Windows Server 2003 R2. With it, the ministry has been able to improve the reliability of routine software updates between central and branch office servers, restoring at least two days per month of productivity to IT staff and police officers in branch offices.
Situation
The Austrian Ministry of the Interior (known in Austria as Bundesministerium für Inneres, or BM.I) is responsible for law enforcement in Austria. Its domain covers the Federal Police and border control. Throughout Austria, the ministry has 35,000 employees and approximately 1,200 offices, which are chiefly police stations and border control stations.
The ministry’s small IT department (30 people) manages a countrywide fleet of 15,000 desktop computers and used to manage approximately 1,500 server computers as well. However, in 2001, in response to budget pressures and the age of its Microsoft® Windows NT® Server operating system network, the ministry migrated all its servers to the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system with the Active Directory® service. In the process, the ministry whittled 1,500 servers to 500 and consolidated 1,500 domains into one.
This move gave the Austrian ministry a single directory and communications infrastructure for its entire organization and enabled more efficient communication within the ministry and with other governmental agencies. It is also enabling the ministry to reduce total ownership costs by €7.26 million (U.S.$7.3 million) over five years. Savings will come from server consolidation; reduced operating costs (by eliminating dependence on outside partners, automating many management tasks, and reducing the personnel needed forcomputer configuration); and reduced development time.
In mid-2005, the ministry installed Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1Enterprise Edition to take advantage of added security features that have helped decrease security issuesand improve system security. Service Pack 1 also applies security updates automatically, reducing IT work further and improving system availability. Windows Server 2003 is the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.
Günter Gruber, Project Lead for Windows Server 2003 R2 and Systems Management for the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, and Wolfgang Müller, Project Lead at the ministry, pressed on for still more efficiencies and savings for Austrian taxpayers. In 2005, they targeted yet another area for improvement: replicating software between the central data center in Vienna and 1,200 branch offices. These offices have no IT professionals; rather, they’re staffed by police officers and administrative personnel. About half of these police stations and border control checkpoints contain a server computer, and all contain one or more desktop computers.
Gruber’s staff maintains these systems remotely, using features such as Remote Assistance in the Microsoft Windows® XP Professional operating system and management technologies in Windows Server 2003 such as Active Directory and Group Policy Management Console. Every two to three months, on a rolling basis, the IT department updates the operating system and application software on these remote computers, most recently using the Windows Server 2003 File Replication Services. This technology detects changes to shared files and folders and replicates those changes to other servers on the network.
However, once or twice every month, the replication process would be interrupted unexpectedly by an electrical power failure or a hardware failure. This would cause the file system in the branch or central office server to become corrupted, and sometimes data would even disappear irrevocably.
“These failures were a major headache for the IT staff as well as for police officers in the field,” Gruber says. “Our IT staff would have to repair the file structure on all affected servers, which took two or three people one to two days. The outages affected police productivity as well because the local branch office server was out of commission, and officers had no access to the data they needed to do their jobs. This resulted in lost officer productivity at best and a potential for breaches in citizen protection at worst.”
Solution
The ministry initially deployed Windows Server 2003 R2 on 10 server computers and plans to deploy the operating system on approximately 150 servers that are used for file replication. The ministry plans to deploy Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition at the central office and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition at the branch offices. Windows Server 2003 R2—the second release of the Windows Server 2003 operating system—builds on the security benefits provided by Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 while providing a suite of new features that improve the management of branch office servers.
Specifically, Windows Server 2003 R2 includes a completely rewritten replication engine for Distributed File System (DFS). DFS Replication provides a robust file replication service that is significantly more scalable and more efficient in synchronizing file servers than its predecessor, File Replication Services. DFS Replication allows IT staffs toschedule replication and uses a new technology called Remote Differential Compression to transmit only changed portions of files across the network, conserving expensive network bandwidth. Also, if a network connection or server computer fails during a transmission, Windows Server 2003 R2 intelligently notes the point of failure and resumes the replication at that point rather than starting over.
Taking advantage of these efficiencies, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior has been able to update branch office server computer software without fear of interruptions frompower or hardware failures. If a failure does occur mid-transmission, Windows Server 2003 R2 automatically manages the restart of the transmission once the failure has been repaired.
Benefits
The Austrian Ministry of the Interior has realized productivity gains in both central andbranch offices due to Windows Server 2003 R2. Time that used to be lost to reconstructing damaged data and waiting forserver computers to return to service has been restored to the ministry’s IT staff and police officers. Storage management features in Windows Server 2003 R2 have allowed theIT staff to better anticipate and plan for changing storage needs, and Remote Differential Compression is providing network bandwidth savings.
Boosts in IT and Branch Staff Productivity
Because Windows Server 2003 R2 intelligently manages file transmissions even in the face of hardware or power failures, the ministry has been able to improve the IT staff’s productivity, which used to be consumedby file restorations. Windows Server 2003 R2 has also restored the police officers’ productivity, which used to be lost to failed servers.
“With Windows Server 2003 R2, we’ve been able to eliminate two days of lost productivity per month for two to three IT staff members,” Müller says. “Similarly, we’ve eliminated one to two days per month of lost productivity for entire branch office staffs that used to be hobbled by failed servers.”
Further, the ministry’s IT staff uses a Windows Server 2003 R2 feature called the DFS Health Report to get a snapshot of replication status between the central office and branch locations. This report shows at a glance which replications have failed, further saving precious IT staff time and speeding theresolution of problems.
Another productivity-boosting technology in Windows Server 2003 R2 is DFS Namespace, which allows administrators to group shared folders located on different server computers and present them to users as a virtual tree of folders known as a namespace. If a remote server fails, Windows Server 2003 R2 automatically and transparently redirects users in that office to the closest available server. When the branch server is restored to service, DFS Namespace redirects users back to their local server.
“In the past, we’ve had servers go down once or twice a month, losinga day’s worth of productivity for the affected branch office,” Müller says. “With Windows Server 2003 R2, users can continue working when there’s been a local server failure. Our IT staff can repair the server behind the scenes without interrupting user productivity.”
Better Ability to Anticipate StorageNeeds
The deployment of Windows Server 2003 R2 is also helping the ministry better meet its storage needs. Becausemore users were sending email attachments and using graphics- and image-rich applications, the IT staff was getting frequent panicked calls from users who had just run out of disk space. With the File Server Resource Manager in Windows Server 2003 R2, however, the ministry IT staff know exactly how much storage is available on branch and central server computers. The featurealso identifies types of data stored on servers so that the IT staff can eliminate unauthorized files such as music or video files that employees may have downloaded on their work computers.
“Windows Server 2003 R2 gives us much better insight into what’s on our disks and the exact dimensions of our data and file systems,” Müller says. “We can anticipate rather than react to storage needs.”
Conservation of Network Bandwidth
The Remote Differential Compression feature of Windows Server 2003 R2 is a big help in conserving expensive network bandwidth because it sends only the changed parts of a file across the network rather than the entire file. For example, if a user changes only the title of a 3-megabyte slideshow in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® presentation graphics program, Windows Server 2003 R2 detects that change and sends only the new title, which might take less than a second to replicate over the wide area network. Sending the entire file might take a minute or more.
“Wide area lines to branches are expensive, and every byte saved is useful,” Müller says. “Our bandwidth savings from Windows Server 2003 R2 is significant.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
Windows Server 2003 R2
The Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 family helps organizations do more with less. Now you can run your IT infrastructure more efficiently,build better applications faster,and deliver the best infrastructure for enhancing user productivity. And you can do all this faster, more securely, and at lower cost.
For more information about Windows Server 2003 R2, please visit: