Cemaphore MailShadow Rocks as DR Solution for UK Global Radio

Global Radio, the United Kingdom’s market leader in commercial radio, recently had the opportunity to test its disaster recovery solution, which protects the mailboxes of 2,000 employees. Global Radio relies on Cemaphore Systems, Inc.‘s MailShadow OnSite for Microsoft Exchange continuity and disaster recovery to ensure email uptime for its office employees and mobile users.

MailShadow OnSite protects and replicates email data between Exchange servers in different locations. Unlike other offerings, MailShadow provides a continuous, real-time copy of email data, resulting in near-zero recovery times.

“With over 60 locations in the United Kingdom, Global Radio cannot tolerate email downtime,” said Luke Darby, Infrastructure Systems Manager, Global Radio. “We chose MailShadow because it was the only solution that offered real-time synchronization and transaction-based replication to ensure rapid, seamless email recovery and true data integrity. MailShadow also eliminated the need to duplicate expensive infrastructure at the secondary recovery site for an immediate cost savings of nearly $70,000.”

One evening Luke Darby received a surprise alert: problems with the underlying storage had caused the primary Exchange mailbox cluster in the data center to fail. Email came to a grinding halt. Luke immediately turned to MailShadow to recover the data from 2,000 mailboxes and get users quickly running on email again. Thanks to MailShadow’s mailbox-level flexibility, Luke could selectively fail over different user groups by priority, such as VIP users first. Each group failover achieved the MailShadow target Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective of less than 10 minutes. So despite a serious failure, Global Radio’s email was operating smoothly with happy users in a very short period of time.

"We are truly fortunate to have not only a great disaster recovery solution with MailShadow, but also outstanding technical support from Cemaphore Systems," said Luke Darby. "Picking up the phone and getting immediate support in a crisis is invaluable. Finding both product and customer service excellence with one vendor is priceless.”