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INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORT CASE STUDIES

Centralized, Disaster Ready and High Availability Messaging

The District of Columbia's Mayor Anthony Williams set an important goal to reach a standard of customer service delivery exemplified by prompt response to constituent calls and written correspondence. A key component of this communication is electronic messaging, which is the most highly utilized method of communication within the District and is consequently considered mission critical. Continuous operation of District agency electronic mail is vital to the Government's ability to serve the residents and businesses of the District. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) turned to DBTS staff to plan, design, and implement a highly available citywide electronic messaging system that will consolidate email platforms citywide and will ensure continuous email operations for the DC Government.

The Citywide Messaging team was faced with a host of challenges to overcome. A lack of uniformity of technologies, policies, procedures, and standards contributed to a serious risk to the availability, disaster recovery, and readiness of the electronic mail across District agencies. The DBTS team approached the challenge with a commitment to thorough project planning and technical assessment, effective stakeholder engagement, and the assignment of superior engineering talent. A critical step in this approach was to investigate case studies of enterprise-wide messaging implementations and identify lessons learned and best practices.

In coordination with the Federal Government, the team developed an architecture for citywide electronic messaging that provides the highest level of performance and features to the District agencies. A priority in the design and implementation of this system is the ability to continue citywide email communications in the event of a facility, network, server, or Internet Service Provider (ISP) failure. In order to meet this challenge, the citywide messaging system will be based on a centralized group of servers managed across two OCTO Data Centers (ODCs). This highly-available messaging system will allow OCTO to provide electronic messaging services to all District agencies during normal day-to-day operations, and in the event of a server, network, power, or complete data center outage.

DBTS technology management and engineering resources are leading and delivering the solution and have been responsible for the delivery of a range of documentation including project plans, project schedules, architecture documents and diagrams, processes and procedures, and test plans. In addition, the team developed a small-scale model that served as a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of the migration plan.