Trade union and employment firm Whittles has purchased a new e-mail communication system with a robust business continuity and disaster recovery element after being severely disrupted by a fire at a Manchester communications exchange.

The firm, which has offices in Manchester, Leeds, Sutton Coldfield and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, selected SteelEye Technology's LifeKeeper for Exchange after reviewing its IT infrastructure following the incident.


The network, implemented by IT Professional Services, allows the firm's four sites to communicate in real time and share workloads.


The system has an integrated local area network 'failover' to back up data in the event of a system failure, and a wide area network disaster recovery defence located in another geographical area, linked by a low bandwidth connection.


This ensures that if there is a problem with the main Manchester server, the mail application will be moved to an onsite backup server. If these are both affected a third server located 40 miles away in Leeds can be brought into use.


LifeKeeper for Exchange performs an automatic recovery procedure on detection of any problem with the application, to provide uninterrupted data access.


Its cluster technology also ensures that applications and servers are operational as it performs failover from one server to the other.


David Whittles, joint managing partner at Whittles, said: 'The loss of e-mail would severely impede our ability to operate. Communication is key to our day-to-day operation.'


He explained: 'The firm has experienced an exchange server going down for a number of days, resulting in our offices not being able to communicate with each other.


'It caused a major headache at the time and it is not something we want to repeat.'