Kemp load balancers help Hill Dickinson ensure email uptime

International Law firm Hill Dickinson LLP is using a pair of Kemp LoadMaster 2600 appliances at its primary data center in Liverpool to ensure high availability and resilience for its new Microsoft Exchange 2010 messaging environment.

With more than 190 partners and 1,300 staff operating from offices in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Chester and Sheffield to Athens and Singapore, Hill Dickinson has upgraded its Exchange email platform to meet business performance and growth requirements. And since email is such a business-critical service, reliability and redundancy are paramount.

Based on its new IT centralised architecture, Hill Dickinson has installed the two load balancing appliances alongside resilient Exchange Servers at its Liverpool data center. Kemp, a Microsoft approved vendor for Exchange 2010, has also supplied an LM2600 unit for the secondary disaster recovery data center with full DR failover. The Kemp appliances provide load balancing for the Outlook/Outlook Web Access (OWA) connections across multiple HUB/CAS servers in both data centers.

Kemp Center partner System Professional was responsible for installing and configuring all the devices, along with providing full check and test procedures and also helped to compile technical documentation to support operational use within the live environment.

"We love the day-to-day management of the Kemp LoadMaster units; they're simple to use with powerful reporting that we are integrating into our overall monitoring solution," said Charlie Muir, head of service integration at Hill Dickinson. “We are now also using the Kemp LoadMasters for other key services including fronting our recently installed Citrix environment and our new BigHand digital dictation service – and we expect more to follow in the near future."

Hill Dickinson undertook a detailed look at the load balancing market before choosing the Kemp appliances. “Not only did the LoadMaster Series meet our requirements, it was considerably less than the other units, which meant we could increase the specification, as well as add a dedicated Kemp LM2200 unit for the test Release Environment,” adds Muir. “We have been able to future proof our solution for over five years, instead of three, as well as protecting the live environment by allowing us to fully mimic it.”

“The use of load balancing is becoming essential to ensure performance and resilience when migrating to Exchange 2010 Server,” said George Zervos, who heads up EMEA for Kemp Technologies. “This is fuelling growing demand for affordable solutions and with LoadMaster appliances starting from £1,620.00 we can offer powerful, stable and full-featured application delivery and server load balancing at a fraction of the cost of competitive products.”

We have been able to future proof our solution for over five years, instead of three, as well as protecting the live environment by allowing us to fully mimic it.
Charlie Muir
Head of service integration at Hill Dickinson

Talk to Us!

Do you have application delivery questions? Our engineers would love to help!

Schedule a Call