Hill Dickinson LLP is a full-service commercial law firm, offering a broad range of legal services and advice. It is recognised for its market-leading expertise in the insurance; corporate and commercial; marine; employment and pensions; healthcare; property and construction; and professional risks sectors. The firm now has more than 190 partners and 1,300 people operating from offices in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Chester, Sheffield, Piraeus (Athens) and Singapore.

Charlie Muir (IT Transition Manager) at Hill Dickinson LLP wanted to re-design the firm's existing MS Exchange 2010 messaging environment to meet the performance and growth requirements of the business. Since email is such a business-critical service for the firm, Charlie needed to provide a fully resilient and redundant design with plenty of room for expansion.

A new centralised design for the UK business was created, with resilient Exchange Servers hosted in the primary Liverpool data centre and a full DR failover situated in a separate data centre location. The key challenge was then load-balancing the Outlook/Outlook Web Access (OWA) connections across multiple HUB/CAS servers in both data centres.

System Professional, a premier UK KEMP Centre Partner, discussed Charlie's Exchange migration project requirements in detail and provided an assessment of the KEMP LoadMaster product range. Hill Dickinson LLP subsequently purchased an HA pair of LM2600 units for their Liverpool data centre, which provided the onsite resilience required. A single LM2600 unit was supplied for the secondary DR location, with an additional LM2200 unit for the Release Environment.

Andrew Suthanah, System Professional's Technical Architect, helped Charlie and his Technical Team to install and configure the devices, along with providing full check and test procedures. Andrew also helped to compile technical documentation around the KEMP LoadMaster MS Exchange 2010 implementation and their operational use within the live environment.

Charlie explained how "We love the day-to-day management of the KEMP LoadMaster units. They're really simple to use with the reporting screen and we are in the process of integrating these into our overall monitoring solution."

The success of the initial installation has expanded the scope for the KEMP load-balancers and Charlie added that "Since implementation we have made use of the KEMP LoadMasters for other key services; fronting both our recently installed Citrix environment and our new BigHand digital dictation service. We expect more to follow in the near future."