Nottingham City Council has implemented an open source
e-mail system for 7,500 staff at an average cost of £8 per user per
year.
Richard Heggs, systems analyst at the council, said it desperately
needed to update its e-mail server as the previous proprietary
system was proving unreliable.
The system crashed six or seven times a day, messages were being
lost and some messages were being sent several times. "As we have
to concentrate on delivering electronic government services, this
was unacceptable," he said.
Ten months ago, Heggs invited Suse Linux to put together a
specification for a more scalable e-mail server. At the time, Suse
advised against using its own Suse Linux E-mail Server III product,
as it would be unable to cope with the large numbers of users.
After 17 days of consultation costing £17,000, Suse specified an
alternative e-mail system based on open source components. The
system runs on two servers, a 4-way Xeon server with 4Gbytes of Ram
and a two-way Xeon machine with 2Gbytes of Ram. Heggs recently
replaced the internal disc storage on the e-mail server with a
storage area network.
Taking into account the time and effort involved in implementing
and configuring the system, together with the Suse consulting fee,
Heggs estimates the total cost to date to be about £60,000,
equating to just £8 per end-user mailbox over a year.
By comparison, Heggs said he was aware of another local authority
with 5,000 users where the overall software and hardware bill was
£1m a year.
According to Ashim Pal, vice-president at analyst firm Meta Group,
the cost of running commercial systems such as Microsoft Exchange
and Lotus Domino can be more than £80 per user per year, but these
products have features open source systems lack.
At Nottingham City Council, users connect to e-mail either via a
web user interface or from Outlook on Windows PCs. Heggs made some
changes to the source code as a result of user feedback, but said
he was now happy with the reliability of the server and said it had
improved dramatically.
In the past, concerns have been raised over the long-term viability
of open source, but Heggs was confident his system could be
supported because he had access to the source code. "We have a
great deal more flexibility when it comes to support options and we
are not compelled to rely on one supplier," he said.