Success Stories

The UK’s largest civil service trade union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), serves the needs of over 300,000 members. It campaigns for fair pay and conditions, decent pensions and equality in the workplace. Employing a staff of around 400, half of the organisation is based in London with 11 other satellite offices around the UK.

Because of its distributed offices and dealings with its members, email is one of its most critical applications and in fact, its primary method of communication.

PCS has 12 post offices running Novell GroupWise® 8 and ZENworks® with around 600 mailboxes. Each night, the main post office is backed up using GWAVA Reload.

With the main GroupWise server running low on disk space, PCS personnel decided to move to a virtual GroupWise environment and stay with NetWare®. They built a NetWare VM and moved around 20 mailboxes over to the new system. The migration was working fine at 20 mailboxes a time and they continued following that procedure over a series of weekends.

But one weekend an operator error led to all mailboxes being moved at once. This mistake overworked the GroupWise VM, led to huge backlogs, 100% utilization, file queues of over 600,000 files, system crashes, and took 2-3 weeks to complete. It was very clear the VM could not handle the workload.

In an attempt to fix the problem, PCS tried increasing processors from one to four, used a third party tool to boost VMware performance, doubled the speed of their fibre SAN and upgraded GroupWise to SP1—all to no avail.

In another attempt, they built a SLES VM and kicked off the GroupWise Migration Utility. The utility began copying data at 200Mb an hour, which meant the migration was going to take 56 days! This slow copy rate was due to the poor NSS performance of their NetWare VM.

After checking out the GWAVA Reload support forums, PCS finally decided to use Reload to migrate from NetWare to SLES using the disaster recovery facility. The PCS Reload server is also a VM and the pre-migration job copying the OFFILES ran without a problem in around 24 hours.

PCS then picked a weekend, brought down the NetWare POA, ran a Reload backup, ran the pre-migration job again and then ran the final full migration from Reload onto the new SLES VM. After making a few configuration changes in ConsoleOne®, the migration was finally complete.