The project began over two years ago when the law firm decided it needed to address issues it was having with the downtime of its Microsoft Exchange application. The firm estimated that in the 18 months leading up to the implementation of Teneros’ system, it experienced about 18 hours of downtime.
The firm’s IT department was also struggling to maintain the quality of the performance of the system without having to take it completely off-line.
Julian Rawlinson, head of information systems and support (ISS) at Dickson Minto, said: “Email is unarguably one of Dickson Minto’s most mission critical applications. As such, any disruption to its performance can result in a significant impact to our brand in the eyes of our customers, employees and stakeholders.”
Rawlinson said that the simplicity of the installation was one of the key reasons why the company chose the Teneros application: “At the time of our decision, there was no real contest – Teneros ticked all our boxes. I was very impressed by its simple turnkey appliance that required no Microsoft Exchange expertise, and the fact that it was completely non-intrusive to the company’s Exchange environment.”
“It was a completely worry and pain-free installation. The box was in place within 30 seconds and the first data synchronisation took only four to five hours – all while our system was live. It has categorically been one of the best investments we’ve ever made.”
The Teneros Application Continuity Appliances for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 is a continuity platform for Microsoft Exchange, enabling SMBs to maintain an ongoing backup of the Exchange mail store.
According to the company, if a problem with the Exchange server is detected – whether planned or not – the Teneros platform performs an Instant-On failover and begins serving end-users with no disruption in email service or functionality.
Rawlinson said: “In our business there is simply no room for email downtime. Even on Sundays deals are still going through. Previously, taking the system off-line to simply defrag it, for example, would have been fraught with downtime challenges.
With Teneros, it is a very straight-forward failover process that causes no disruption to the system availability and results in us being able to ensure that Exchange can operate to its optimum performance level for our users.”
Dickson Minto was founded in 1985 by Alastair Dickson and Bruce Minto. The law firm specialises in corporate and commercial law.
