KLA-Tencor Corporation, headquartered in San Jose, California, supplies process-control and yield management solutions to manufacturers in the semiconductor and related microelectronics industries. Chip manufacturing companies seek to get as much yield as possible from their production facilities, and KLA-Tencor provides inspection tools that help these companies locate product defects and improve their chip fabrication processes. KLA-Tencor maintains branch offices staffed with sales and support personnel in the United States, Europe, and Asia to serve its growing global customer base. The company has more than 5,500 employees worldwide.
For nine years, KLA-Tencor based its global communication and collaboration environment on Microsoft® Exchange Server version 5.5, running first on the Microsoft Windows NT® Server operating system version 4.0, and later on Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server. The company's messaging infrastructure consisted of 7,200 mailboxes on 52 servers distributed around the world, many of them local servers supporting small branch offices. The company chose this configuration at the time because it determined that e-mail client performance would be unacceptably slow if it ran over the company's Wide Area Network (WAN). Furthermore, if network access to a remote server were lost, users would be unable to send or receive e-mail.
This architecture was sufficient when e-mail was not a critical resource for the company, and loss of connectivity for a day and the disappearance of mail due to outages would not have a significant impact on business operations. However, employees came to rely heavily on electronic communications. Because the distributed architecture had local mail servers at each branch office, employees developed an expectation that internal e-mail would be delivered to recipients anywhere in the company within minutes of being sent. They had also embraced e-mail as a collaboration tool, frequently using the system to transfer files to other employees for review and modification. The increasingly mobile nature of the company's workforce caused it to use Web and mobile access more. As use of the system grew, so did problems with providing adequate IT support. This was especially true for the company's remote branch offices where fewer support resources were available.
By 2003, KLA-Tencor realized it had outgrown its messaging system, as an increasing number of stability issues left as many as several hundred users at remote branch offices without access to e-mail for hours at a time, while technicians resolved the problem. The company's systems administrators at its data center in Milpitas, California, often found themselves laboring overnight to recover the contents of user mailboxes and resolve these issues remotely for employees across the globe.
KLA-Tencor found itself with a communications environment that no longer met its message transfer and retention needs. The large number of Exchange Server 5.5 computers installed on aging hardware, some of which served branch offices with only 10 to 15 mailboxes, resulted in costly support fees. The company's IT staff was forced to focus on keeping the company's systems online, rather than working to improve the infrastructure.
KLA-Tencor decided to undertake an extensive upgrade of software and hardware to address these issues and to take advantage of the progress made in communication and collaboration technology since the company designed its Exchange Server 5.5 environment. At that time, a distributed server environment was desirable because of issues surrounding network bandwidth and connectivity. Newer technology addresses these issues in ways that enable organizations to consolidate and centralize their infrastructure, which KLA-Tencor knew would make administration of its systems easier and help reduce IT costs.
KLA-Tencor laid out its requirements and objectives as follows:
- Centralize and consolidate the messaging server infrastructure to reduce the number of servers deployed to remote branch offices and simplify administration
- Increase the availability and reliability of the company's messaging systems
- Provide users with access to mailbox information on mobile devices
- Enhance remote access performance and features for Web-based clients
- Enhance remote access for the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, so the new centralized system could meet users' expectations of fast e-mail communication
- Ensure minimal interruption of users' work during migration
"We knew going in that this project would be a big challenge," says Ken Pauley, Director of Technical Services for KLA-Tencor. "This was a new environment for us, and we didn't necessarily have the in-house technical expertise to deploy a global solution like the one we were envisioning. Another challenge was the timeline. We needed to resolve our downtime issues as quickly as possible, and our current solution was reaching the end of its support life in a couple of years."
Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Allin Consulting, KLA-Tencor began the upgrade project in September 2003. The company's relationship with Allin began in 1997, when the partner helped KLA-Tencor deploy its Exchange Server version 5.0 messaging system, and the two companies had worked closely together since then. "Partnering with Allin was a key aspect of our migration," says Pauley. "With Allin's assistance, we were able to augment our staff with consultants who had the expertise to properly deploy the solution and help train our administrators to use it. It was a true partnership in that we supplied dedicated staffing on our side to work closely with them during the project."
Windows Server 2003 Migration
First, KLA-Tencor upgraded its existing Windows NT Server 4.0 domains to the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system with Active Directory® service. To reduce costs, KLA-Tencor and Allin developed a new server deployment process. Vendors shipped the new hardware not to the Milpitas data center, but to each office location worldwide. The Milpitas technicians created CDs containing images for each new server and sent them to technicians at the regional offices. The regional technicians installed the hardware, connected it to the network, and inserted the CD with the server's image on it. Then the Milpitas technicians remotely performed the remainder of the server installation and configuration using Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. They used the Active Directory connection wizard to synchronize the Exchange Server 5.5 environment with the new Active Directory, in preparation for the addition of Exchange Server 2003 servers to the company's messaging infrastructure.
Once Active Directory was in place, technicians deployed Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 to more than 4,500 desktop computers in five months, using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. "This was one of the few changes we made that was visible to the users," says Pauley. "It was also one of the most significant parts in terms of our success, because it allowed us to take advantage of the Cached Exchange Mode feature in Outlook 2003."
Exchange Server 2003 Migration
KLA-Tencor then consolidated its mail sites using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), installed on Dell clustered servers to provide failover capabilities. Microsoft released Exchange Server 2003 SP1 after the project began but before the company deployed the Exchange Server 2003 part of the solution, and technicians found that new features in the program provided native solutions to issues they had originally planned to resolve using third-party tools.
There was, for example, no native tool in any of the earlier versions of Exchange Server to migrate mailboxes across site boundaries. Before the new solution, technicians would export those mailboxes to PST format files and then delete the mailboxes on the old site after migration. Exchange Server 2003 SP1 enabled KLA-Tencor to natively perform cross-site migration of mailboxes. Technicians used the Public Folder Migration Tool in Exchange Server 2003 to easily move the company's 40,000 public folders to the new servers.
Working during off hours and staggering the installation to minimize impact on the system's users, KLA-Tencor migrated more than 7,000 mailboxes to Exchange Server 2003 from August 2004 to November 2004. By that time, employees had been using Outlook 2003 for approximately a month to access their mail on Exchange Server 5.5 server computers. "The Exchange Server 2003 migration process went so smoothly that most users didn't realize they were using a new system until they saw all of the new features in Outlook Web Access," says Pauley.
New Infrastructure
When KLA-Tencor brought the project to a successful conclusion in November 2004, its infrastructure had changed dramatically.
The Milpitas Data Center infrastructure consists of:
- A four-node (three active, one passive) back-end Exchange Server 2003 cluster that hosts all user mailboxes in the United States. This server is connected to a Storage Area Network (SAN) running IBM ESS800 Enterprise Storage Server.
- Two Exchange Server 2003 front-end servers that handle Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, IMAP, and wireless interfaces to the back-end servers.
- Two Exchange Server 2003 "bridgehead" servers processing site-to-site communications and Internet mail.
- A two-node Exchange Server 2003 clustered-resource server hosting public folders for the site.
The resource server is attached to a dedicated SCSI storage unit providing shared storage using a Dell PowerVault 220S External Storage array.
The Regional Hub infrastructure consists of one two-node active/passive Exchange Server 2003 cluster, with the Dell PowerVault 220S External Storage array attached.
In the months since its Exchange Server 2003 environment was implemented, KLA-Tencor has seen many benefits from the new system. The company has significantly reduced the number of servers that its network administrators must manage. Users enjoy the system's high availability and have gained enhanced features and mobile access.
Consolidated Server Structure
KLA-Tencor has dramatically reduced the number of servers that it manages. In the United States, the company reduced its messaging server infrastructure from 37 servers to 10. The company's server consolidation at its international offices reduced the number of servers outside the United States from 21 to 11.
This consolidation provides branch offices with faster response time when issues with the network arise, because the servers are located at hub offices where IT staff members are present to handle the problem. The three Exchange Server 2003 administrators located at the Milpitas data center have fewer servers to maintain and can devote their time to improving existing systems and implementing new solutions for the company. "With Exchange Server 2003 in place, we can move forward on some other things we're interested in," says Pauley. "For example, our users have traditionally relied on e-mail for collaboration, which raises document-control issues. We'd like to start integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, which we've already deployed, more closely with our processes."
High Availability
The frequent system outages that KLA-Tencor employees experienced before the upgrade created a lot of pressure to implement a solution that provided them with high availability. The new architecture meets that requirement. The company reports that it has experienced failover events that users never even noticed, because the failover process went so smoothly. "The failover process takes 90 seconds at most," says Pauley. "Users with cached mode enabled don't notice outages that short, so, in effect we've achieved zero downtime."
Previously, when hardware issues caused a server to fail, technicians would sometimes have to work all night on the problem to get things running for people in the morning. The enhanced failover functions of Exchange Server 2003 ensure that messaging services will remain available to users during outages, allowing technicians to treat the problem more effectively during working hours when the entire department is onsite.
The ability to quickly back up and restore data also contributes to the system's high availability. The flexibility Exchange Server 2003 provides in the form of multiple storage groups minimizes backup and restore times, so business processes do not become stalled while users wait for needed items to be returned to them.
Enhanced Features and Performance
The Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange Mode option was important to KLA-Tencor because of the distributed nature of its organization. Administrators configured the Outlook installations on users' computers to automatically detect when the network connection to the messaging servers becomes congested. When this occurs, Outlook switches to a mode in which it downloads only the headers of new mail messages. The software does not download the full contents of a message to the local computer, including attachments, until the user begins actively working with the message.
Because many employees at KLA-Tencor use e-mail to share large documents, this ability to adjust for a lack of available bandwidth greatly improves the performance of Outlook by reducing the time it takes to synchronize their mail folders with the mail store on the network. It also reduces the amount of bandwidth users consume, which enabled the company to remove its mail servers from the remote branch offices and have those employees instead access servers at a regional hub location across the WAN. If the connection to the hub is lost, those users can continue to work offline in Outlook. When the connection is restored, Outlook automatically and seamlessly connects back to the network.
"People at the branch offices were concerned that after the migration, Outlook would become sluggish, and they'd experience a lot of downtime, because the mail server wouldn't be right next door anymore," says Mike Leece, Practice Director for the Northern California Office of Allin Consulting. "The Outlook Cached Exchange Mode provides users with the same experience they were used to with a local Exchange server, only now they are accessing their mail over the WAN."
Users are also taking advantage of the functionality of the new version of Outlook Web Access, which they describe as a significant improvement on the Exchange Server 5.5 version. This technology provides mobile users with an interface that almost exactly resembles the Outlook client on their desktop.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on Windows Server 2003. It creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about KLA-Tencor products and services, call (408) 875-3000 or visit the Web site at:
www.kla-tencor.com
This case study can be found on the Microsoft website as well.
