NHSmail - Largest Exchange 2007 Server in the World

Skeeter

Skeeter

Skeeter

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Just checked my NHS email account, expecting it to be closed (it isnt) as I left 2 months ago, and found an NHSmail newsletter. Being a self taught NHSmail guru i find this information quite scary considering the shoddy effort the current IMAP/Web portal based email system is.

NHSmail is changing
An update on the transformation of your service
The programme to move NHSmail to Microsoft Exchange 2007 is progressing well. As you may imagine it’s not without its challenges:
• The new service will be the largest Exchange 2007 implementation of its type in the world
• We will move 200,000 active accounts to the new service from the old one whilst maintaining service continuity.
• We’ve engaged with end users throughout the design process, ensuring that those who will use NHSmail have a service that meets their needs
• Over 500 servers have been purchased and new accommodation built to house them in the two NHSmail data centres
• All the servers and services have to be built, installed and configured in advance of the next stages of the project
• Storage purchased so far amounts to over four quadrillion bytes
• The design requirements list is over 1,300 items long resulting in design documents totalling more than 2,000 pages
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Im not so familiar with Exchange, so what is 200,000 users on 500 servers like in the ways of setups? It will aparently be the largest Exchange 2007 Server setup in the world.... which scares me considering the Government and NHS's history with IT
 
Largest of its type. I'm not sure what they mean by that, but it isn't the largest in the world full stop.

With Flex coming down the line I don't expect it to be the largest of its type for very long either.
 
Gilly said:
Largest of its type. I'm not sure what they mean by that, but it isn't the largest in the world full stop.

With Flex coming down the line I don't expect it to be the largest of its type for very long either.
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Yeah, im not entirely sure what 'of its type' means? Im assuming Exchange 2007 as its the newest incarnation.
 
Skeeter said:
We will move 200,000 active accounts to the new service from the old one whilst maintaining service continuity.
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I think that should be "we plan to move ... whilst maintaining service".

The hardware investment seems a bit over the top. 500 servers equals one for every 400 users, the majority of which are inactive, but then I've only any experience with unix mail servers, so I suppose on an MS platform you need 10 times the hardware.
 
Thast only 400 accounts per server. not much for a decent Exchange server setup really. As long as the backups are good, i cant see it being an issue as long as the IT staff doing it know what they are doing of course.
 
I assist in the back end (SAN) sizing of many exchange deployments.

While that is a large one it's not the biggest with regards to active mailboxes :) This seems a bit of a PR stunt. "Four Quadrillion bytes" I mean, who the hell uses those terms??! Talk in GB and Terabytes!

I'm a bit miffed at the need for 250 servers per site for this, I know a larger exchange implementation running off five large servers per site.

On the storage side four quadrillion bytes = 4 Petabytes or 4000 TB. For Exchange??!! I know you size exchange based on performance rather than capacity but 4PB is NOT for exchange, someone is sneaking in an entire environment refresh or is this a typical NHS project with huge waste??
 
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It doesn't suggest what the storage is going to be used for but shared between 500 servers would be a logical assumption.

I would suggest that when they say two sites they are going to have a live site (250 servers) and a DR site (250 servers). I would suggest that it would be 2000TB at each site rather than all together as well.

This would fit in with my estimations of server/space requirements anyway.




M.
 
scorza said:
Cloud computing init? It's how Google is almost never down.
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It's funny how every large bank and financial institution makes do with a decent DR setup, a total of 10 large servers and a fraction of the storage but hey, once the taxpayer is paying LETS GO CRAZEEEEYYYY.
 
m4cc45 said:
It doesn't suggest what the storage is going to be used for but shared between 500 servers would be a logical assumption.

I would suggest that when they say two sites they are going to have a live site (250 servers) and a DR site (250 servers). I would suggest that it would be 2000TB at each site rather than all together as well.

This would fit in with my estimations of server/space requirements anyway.

M.
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If this is for Exchange it is massively overscoped. Horrendously overscoped. Kid in a candyshop with an expresso overscoped.

2PB on Exchange? Fair enough there is a large number of users but
that's a lot for an email system. Remember email is not a file save systems and the NHS has numerous other sustems that are meant to act as file store.

That works out to be 100GB per user. In four years of heavy email use with tens of thousands of files i've only racked up around 8GB and that's with bad use, I treat my email like a file store and delete nothing at all.

4PB on SAN arrays......that's touching north of £40 million and that's not including the fabric!
 
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Vanilla said:
It's funny how every large bank and financial institution makes do with a decent DR setup, a total of 10 large servers and a fraction of the storage but hey, once the taxpayer is paying LETS GO CRAZEEEEYYYY.
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Except that if a bank loses its servers you may be slightly inconvenienced. If that happens in the NHS people may die.

That sort of difference has a *slight* bearing on your uptime requirements - and for every extra 9 you require you're talking an exponential increase in cost.
 
Visage said:
Except that if a bank loses its servers you may be slightly inconvenienced. If that happens in the NHS people may die.

That sort of difference has a *slight* bearing on your uptime requirements - and for every extra 9 you require you're talking an exponential increase in cost.
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For an email system?

This isn't a perscription system, or a critical health system, or a heart monitor system, it's email. I've never heard of someone dying because a nurse couldn't get her blackberry working.
 
Vanilla said:
For an email system?

This isn't a perscription system, or a critical health system, or a heart monitor system, it's email. I've never heard of someone dying because a nurse couldn't get her blackberry working.
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Its not just about email - its about resource management, appointment bookings etc...
 
Vanilla said:
Still not a critical systems that can lead to deaths....and certainly not a system that requires that amount of resource 'just in case'.
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I'd concede that in this case a 10 minute outage, for example, is highly unlikely to cause a death.

...but if that one-in-a-million event *did* happen (or even played a minor contributory role), can you imagine the storms of protest?

'NHS computers kill granny', 'Caring mother murdered by botched IT scheme', 'Loving father died because government built system on the cheap'.
 
Visage said:
I'd concede that in this case a 10 minute outage, for example, is highly unlikely to cause a death.

...but if that one-in-a-million event *did* happen (or even played a minor contributory role), can you imagine the storms of protest?

'NHS computers kill granny', 'Caring mother murdered by botched IT scheme', 'Loving father died because government built system on the cheap'.
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If this was the case then every single system the NHS use would require £100 million because you could argue that there is that one in a million chance with everything they do.

The key is to step back and look at things realistically.

The NHS will face a torrent of abuse over their IT systems anyway because they always overspend and always implement poorly. They're also very early on the curve for Exchange 2007, most other companies are not considering it for another year at least.
 
Vanilla said:
If this was the case then every single system the NHS use would require £100 million because you could argue that there is that one in a million chance with everything they do.

The key is to step back and look at things realistically.

The NHS will face a torrent of abuse over their IT systems anyway because they always overspend and always implement poorly. They're also very early on the curve for Exchange 2007, most other companies are not considering it for another year at least.
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Your last paragraph sums up the situation nicely. The majority of NHS systems do work absolutely fine, but the perception is that they dont.

Which is yet another reason to over-spec systems. To go back to the email system, a 10 minute outage per day may have zero clinical effect, but its surprising how a small problem can morph.

Person A says 'My email sometimes doesnt work'
Person B repeats that as 'My mate works for the NHS and is always having problems with email'
Person C repeats that as 'I've heard that the NHS email system doesnt work'
Person D then says 'NHS systems are rubbish and dont work'
The Daily Mail then says 'GOVERNMENT WASTE BILLIONS ON SYSTEMS THAT DONT WORK'

Its not about raw numbers that say the system works X% of the time - its about public expectations and perceptions. The public want (and expect) a system that works 100% of the time (or as near as possible), regardless of whether such reliability is clinically justified.
 
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