SAGE Publications Selects C2C Archiving Solution

C2C has implemented Archive One to support, manage and achieve legal compliance for SAGE’s 300 mailboxes.

 
As a leading international publishing company of books, journals and electronic media, SAGE Publications was experiencing rapid data expansion with email volumes doubling year on year and growth of attachments escalating ten fold.  SAGE’s IT department is led by Martin Watkins, IT Manager, who manages SAGE’s critical servers and applications.
 
The email environment supports 300 mailboxes on one Microsoft Exchange 5.5 email server. Until 2007, archiving was achieved through the use of a 100-disk archiving library solution. Archiving policies were restricted to archiving anything older than 90 days and storing it indefinitely on CD/DVD.  Retrieval of individual emails involved the system linking messages; identifying the correct CD/DVD and retrieving it. In addition, the system was groaning under exponential data growth as editors started to submit manuscripts electronically with single attachments regularly exceeding 70MB causing backup windows to frequently last all night. From a user perspective, users were hindered by rigid mailbox quotas and the system did not facilitate remote access for the increasing Blackberry user base.  
 
After upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2003, the IT department embarked upon a project to optimise the volume of messages whilst allowing greater mailbox capacity for their users. So SAGE invited C2C to demo their Archive One solution. Martin notes: “We were very impressed with the demo and made a decision to go ahead largely based on that. We felt that Archive One would provide us with everything we needed.”
 
SAGE completed the installation in less than half a day. Archive One was set to provide archive policy management of greater than 60 days or greater than 1MB in size, to be identified and archived using Archive One’s fast review technology. The resultant primary repository holds 57GB with 1.96 million messages. Notably, thanks to compression, the size of the total storage has significantly decreased since Archive One’s installation. Archived volumes are reduced further still by saving duplicated attachments only once.
 
Daily backup times on the Exchange Server have been reduced from overnight to an acceptable level of 1 hour 45 minutes. Archive One has transferred the costs of expensive Exchange Server disk space into a secure primary repository. From a user perspective, there are still mailbox quotas, but these now reside at 850MB. To address the companies’ growing Blackberry device users, remote access to email is now guaranteed. Best retention and access practices have also been addressed – for when it comes to locating an individual email or attachment, this now takes less than 3 seconds.
 
Martin sums up the C2C experience: “Using Archive One has allowed us to dramatically reduce our Exchange database size whilst still allowing all messages to be available in a timely manner to users. It’s been easy to use and implement and has revolutionised the way we treat email.”