Case Studies

Scottish Youth Hostels - Hosted Exchange (Dedicated)

Databarracks Hosted Exchange improves availability and centralises emails for Scottish Youth Hostels Association

The Client

Scottish Youth Hostels Association (www.syha.org.uk), which has over 70 locations and 175 mailboxes.

The Challenge

To migrate SHYA to a hosted exchange platform after another provider failed.

The Solution

Databarracks proposed a dedicated hosted email service and carried out two months of testing before successfully upgrading and migrating the sites to Databarracks' Dedicated Hosted Exchange 2010 platform.

SYHA Hostelling Scotland is the largest network of tourist Youth Hostels in Scotland, offering a diverse network of around 70 youth hostels in some of the most stunning locations across the country. As a charity, they aim to provide opportunities for all, and especially young people, to experience Scotland's natural heritage and places of historic and cultural interest.

SYHA was running Exchange 2003 from its head office in Stirling and their IT Manager, Bob McMeekin, was seeking to improve the availability of the service through a hosted provider and upgrade to a 2010 Exchange platform.

"Our key requirements were resiliency, ease of access and, very importantly, something that would fit with our DR policy," explains
McMeekin.

Originally, another provider attempted to migrate Hostelling Scotland to hosted Exchange 2010 on a shared platform but it was unsuccessful: "They had difficulties with the installation and connecting users to the hosted server," reveals McMeekin. "There were also issues with the planned migration process and the impact the downtime would have on the business."

Hostelling Scotland approached Databarracks to provide a solution and they proposed a cloud email service on a dedicated rather than a shared Hosted Exchange platform. This would allow SYHA to continue managing the hosted exchange and crucially, enable
integration with IT services hosted locally, in particular their booking system, an integral revenue- generating part of the business.
Databarracks carried out a proof of concept exercise before migrating Hostelling Scotland to a dedicated hosted Exchange 2010 on a private cloud platform.

"Our main aim was to switch over with a minimum of disruption. Exchange is used for bookings and enquiries so downtime has the
potential to be extremely costly. Databarracks worked with us on that and trialled out a number of different solutions to make the
eventual migration as pain free as possible," says McMeekin.

As part of the implementation process Databarracks engineers worked throughout the weekend resolving several technical difficulties during the migration and at no charge to the organisation.

Post-migration, SYHA also had difficulties with some of the Outlook clients connecting, so Databarracks helped to upgrade all the users from Outlook 2000 to 2010 and shared the cost of doing so.

"Now that our email is hosted in the cloud, it's easy for remote workers to get access. It also fits into our DR policy. We don't have to worry about how we replicate our entire Exchange system. It's Databarracks' responsibility," says McMeekin.

Databarracks also provide SYHA with Asigra online backup, which allows SYHA to restore individual mailboxes should a user accidentally delete an email. "Again, with backup, Databarracks went the extra mile, enabling us to restore back to message
level," explains McMeekin.

"I've been extremely happy with the level of service we've received from Databarracks. Right through the pre and post implementation process, everyone we dealt with was very professional." says McMeekin.