Now this is going to bore the pants off some of you! - however for some people it is very important so here it is in a nutshell! How does the whole thing work, how safe is my data, how are backups taken, where is the resilience?

Your Office Anywhere comprises two data centre's located in Manchester approximately two miles apart within the main internet (T1) hub of Manchester. The design and implementation of the system was performed using Microsoft best practices and support from Microsoft relating to the provisioning system which allows end users (you!) to change mailbox settings add and delete users etc. The whole solution is hosted on the latest dual core Dell rack mounted servers.

Data Centre 1

Contains a pilot set of servers which we used to test the feasibility of the solution and now contains a server with lots of disk for backups. Data Centre 1 backs up the backup servers' disk in Data Centre 2 so the data backups are available in case of a site failure at Data Centre 2. This provides total resilience in case of a disaster.

Data Centre 2

Contains the solution that will now be deployed to all users either as a dedicated solution for the customer or a solution that is "shared"(see below) with other customers and branded as Your Office Anywhere;

• A backup server with lots of disk to backup the Your Office Anywhere solution locally at the data centre.
• Multiple Domain Controllers to allow logons via the internet;
• Multiple DNS servers to resolve YourOfficeAnywhere.co.uk on the internet;
• Active Passive Exchange Cluster for email resilience and capacity for more than 5,000 mailboxes;
• Active Passive SQL cluster for resilience;
• Multiple front end exchange servers to allow fast access via internet browsers to Outlook Web Access;
• Sharepoint server(s) allows web based document management facility;
• Terminal server farm allows the load balancing of applications such as word, excel sage, blue-chip, or a bespoke SQL application. Multiple servers ensures that should a server be unavailable another server will service the request to launch an application;
• Microsoft Operations Manager to pro-actively monitor the status of all servers in the data centre and notify of any systems that are hitting critical and warning levels;
• Bespoke customer owned servers;
• Front end provisioning server that allows customers to manage users and access via a web front end if required;

Shared in this case means that the server resources are shared by multiple customers, there is no sharing of data. Customers are allocated a specific area of disk, and security is set so that only the customer can see their data and applications.