National Drilling Company (NDC) is an organization in the oil and gas sector that predominantly offers drilling and well maintenance services, with an added focus on protecting the surrounding environment as well as the health and safety of its employees. NDC’s line of offerings includes Offshore Services, Ground Water Research Programs, Directional and Horizontal, Barge Services, Wireline Services, and Logging Services.

 

This project marks an extension of ITQAN’s solid relationship of NDC, seeing that the latter sourced ITQAN for many of its IT requirements pertaining to hardware and software solutions. This time NDC needed to upgrade their infrastructure through deploying the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server for better functioning of their email messaging system. 

 

NDC’s infrastructure setup had 1000 desktops and 40 servers operating. NDC used Microsoft Exchange 2003 for its email correspondence, and this triggered the requirement of upgrading their Exchange server from 2003 to the latest version, 2007. The limitations of Microsoft Exchange 2003 made NDC realize the need to upgrade to the latest version. A huge organization like NDC needs zero downtime and optimum performance of their messaging system. Employees needed to be in the loop continuously, and any disruptions would inevitably hamper the company’s overall performance, which is something that cannot be compromised.

 

Moreover, an advantage not present in Exchange 2003 is the Outlook Voice Access feature. This feature enables users to retrieve e-mail messages from their mailbox using an analog, digital, or cellular telephone. They can then interact with their mailbox by using touchtone or voice commands.

 

“We are very happy NDC sourced us for this project, and support them on this strategic decision to upgrade their Exchange server. We have vast experience and extremely proficient resources that have implemented similar projects at various sites, and are confident about the successful outcome of this project,” pointed out ITQAN’s General Manager, Feras Al-Jabi.

 

NDC sourced ITQAN to implement migration of data from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Microsoft Exchange 2007 and in effect allow the users to experience the benefits of the latest version, and simultaneously eliminate the burdens of the older system. 
The implementation required the installation of another server, increasing the number of servers in NDC to 41. Furthermore, Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition with Microsoft Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 was included as the software for this solution. The superiority of Microsoft Exchange 2007 owes to its 64-bit architecture that essentially leads to better performance.

NDC’s performance fundamentally improved since they experienced lower downtime for their data, better data recovery and less recovery time. This is critical for oil and gas companies that typically manage enormous amounts of information and cannot afford to experience any difficulty in retrieving this data. The latter is also more often than not required to be accessed anytime, anywhere, which is an advantage easily facilitated through Microsoft Outlook Voice Access.

“The new capabilities of Exchange Server 2007 deliver the advanced security and protection your company demands, the anywhere access to email, voicemail, calendar, and contacts your people want, and the operational efficiency IT needs. Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging goes beyond email messaging and today’s standalone voicemail systems to deliver a unified inbox experience that includes email messages, voicemail, and faxing functionality, as well as new capabilities such as speech-based auto attendant, which allows users to access their communications from any phone.”  – Mustapha Ramadan – Microsoft Oil & Gas Sales Manager.

 

A general problem haunting any organization is cost cutting, especially during the current credit crunch. A usually overlooked benefit of Microsoft Exchange 2007 is enabling unified communication at a lower cost via the process of continuous replication. Local Continuous Replication delivers database redundancy with rapid recovery, minimizing the frequency of full tape backups. With Cluster Continuous Replication in combination with Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), active/passive clusters provide both database and service redundancy without requiring expensive shared storage, even when clusters span geographic locations.