Have been viewing some of the threads with interest regarding running BES's internationally and the fact that MAPI connections are hungry for bandwidth.
We're about to trial running some O2 BlackBerry's in London, connecting to a BES here in Perth, Western Australia.
RIM assure me that there won't be an issue with performance etc and that the O2 device will just work and automatically connect to the Australian BES. Anyone had any experience with this?
I suspect I will need to install a BES in the USA and the UK to support these users.
Where are the mailboxes for the London customers (in the UK or in Perth)? How many BlackBerrys are you planning on using the the UK? It is absolutely possible to have BlackBerrys off of a distant BES, but we've always tried to limit the number in order to limit traffic between Exchange (in London) and the BES (somewhere in the US). Short answer: yes, but...
In general, you want to have the Exchange server and the BES in the same location, and the BES hooked up to the nearest RIM infrastructure access point (North America, Europe, Asia/Australia).
The mailboxes for the London users will be in London.
We currently have users in Melbourne and Brisbane (with local mailboxes) running off the BES in Perth with no issue, but there's a bit of an increase to London.
The initial trial will be with a couple of units (7230 and a 7730), but I expect probably 20 or so if successful in concept.
I'm used to "Yes, but...." responses (used 'em myself in the past), so that's cool. What trials are for, I guess.
I'll also put a packeteer on the link to get an idea of traffic loads.
As an example, we only have 2-3 London BlackBerrys on our East Coast US BES, and just a few on our Southwest US BES. Afraid of saturating the links. When the SE Asia guys starting talking about BlackBerrys, we insisted they budget on a BES, since we do not have hefty bandwidth between their Exchange server and the existing BES...
You have the right approach - try it and see how it works.
We are actually testing a centrally located BES model. We have 10 in London, 5 in Ireland, 6 in Hong Kong, 8 in Phillipines, 10 in Mexico, 20 in Canada, 1200 in the US.
In our case the mail servers are located in the users home city or country and our BES's are located in Atlanta. When I took this model to RIM they said they would like to see the BES as close to the mail server as possible but if we had the WAN bandwith why not give it a try.
Our purpose for placing the BES's in our Atlanta datacenter has to do with the fact that our global infrastructure support is located in Atlanta. We have a datacenter in Belguim but many of our International WAN links are fatter to and from Atlanta than to and from Belgium.
So far so good. We are a Notes shop and the traffic for example in regards to London users is similar to having 10 London based users traveling to the US. Attachment viewing causes us a little concern but there again, so far so good. We may limit the size of vieable attachments for on one of the BESs and make it primaritly for International users if it becomes an issue.
Currently we are looking at the cost comparison of beefing up our Mexico/Latin America WAN to support a couple hundred BB's on an Atlanta BES versus the hardware, licensing, and support of a BES in Mexico City. Eventually we see includging users in Brazil as well.
Anyway, that's what we are doing for now until we see it being an issue then we may end up deploying a BES per region. We'll see.
Yes we are just moving our second Domino BES into production now.
RIM suggests that if you are running a Domino BES with Wirless E-mail Reconciliation, Wireless Calendar, MDS, and Attachment Viewing all enabled, when you hit 1000 users its time to look at a second BES. I'm at just over 1200 and all is well especially now that we finally upgraded the hardware over Christmas.
With 1200+ Fotune 100 users, I don't want to find the BES break point and then work on getting a second BES into production.
I honestly spend more of my time pushing on RIM, local wireless carriers thoughout the world, and our US carriers to get roaming aggreement in place than I do worrying about the central BES model. I kind of just take it for granted that it is there and ready to handle our global deployment effort.
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