North Hertfordshire District Council Uses ArchiveOne From C2C

Located less than 40 miles from central London, North Hertfordshire is a predominantly rural district comprising of interesting market towns and picturesque villages and has a population of 120,000. As with most local Councils, email has now become the primary communication method both internally and externally and the resultant growth of email was causing significant infrastructure pressures for North Herts.

 
About the email infrastructure:
As such, Mark Robinson, the Council’s Infrastructure Support Team Leader, was tasked to assess and manage the growth of email across the organisation’s 600 mailboxes, most of which are located locally (although the infrastructure also has to support a growing number of remote, flexible workers located across the UK). Mark’s role encompasses support for all applications, networking and email, working within an IT Technical Department of 5. The Council’s Letchworth data centre houses 61 servers including their Microsoft Exchange email server. It was the impending upgrade of this email server from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 that highlighted the need to dramatically reduce the size of the email store prior to the upgrade. Another pressing concern was that the Team felt unable to totally guarantee facilitating requests from the Council’s Information Unit who are responsible for amongst other matters, Freedom of Information and data protection.
 
“We were faced with some major issues that were hampering our ability to provide email services. Firstly our email volumes had increased dramatically – we were receiving and sending just under 13,000 emails each day and the size of attachments were also increasing as we transitioned our services online,” Mark noted. “As with all local and central government departments, we operate a full Freedom of Information request service and to guarantee compliance with regulatory requirements and as such, we needed to have an effective search, retrieval and retention solution.”
 
Self managing Email archive and retrieval facility required:
Previously with no restrictions on mailboxes, users were able to send and receive more and more emails, leaving a distinct management problem of burgeoning stores. The availability of disk storage was becoming a premium and backup times were frequently spreading across 2 days each weekend. Downtime was also a significant issue, which was happening as frequently as every other day.
 
Late in 2007, the IT Technical Team began evaluating solutions to address their problems and at Storage Expo in October they saw a demonstration of ArchiveOne from C2C that seemed to answer their overall ultimate requirement to provide email archiving.
 
“From the initial brief demonstration, ArchiveOne seemed to provide all the features that we were looking for – it would reduce our mailbox size and storage costs whilst managing our email retention and compliance policies,” commented Mark. But it wasn’t just the features that caught their attention, it was also the flexibility, “ArchiveOne has been cleverly designed so that the user retains control but in a manner that allows scalability and flexibility. Other solutions we looked at took away that element of flexibility with rigid filtration and archiving processes.”
 
Further evaluation continued early into the New Year with installation in June 2008; allowing ArchiveOne to reduce the mailbox store through inbuilt compression and support the planned migration to Microsoft Exchange 2000 in September.
 
The solution:
After a phased rollout with minimal user training via the intranet, the resultant email archiving solution provided notable immediate benefits. Mark notes: “We are now confident that we are totally in control of our email. It no longer controls us. The users are self managing, and most of the time totally unaware they are pointing towards archived data.”
 
Installation took less than one day – mainly thanks to the simple, easy to use intuitive GUI. It was critical not to loose any email, so the Team decided to archive anything that was not deemed as current. As such, email was sorted into single year repositories with the resultant migrated stores compressed to less than a third of the size. New repositories are created each year automatically.
 
When users want to retrieve email, the process is totally seamless; message links in Outlook make it look as if the email is there, and users are generally unaware that they are pointing towards an archive store to retrieve information. As the resultant email server is now less full, the speed of email has increased and downtime is minimised.
 
Backup of the email server has now moved from the weekend shift to a manageable one hour window which the Team can now conduct each day.
 
For the Team, their email management role is now proactive not reactive and they can look towards future enhancements. Part of that will be the implementation of other options covered by the ArchiveOne solution suite. Installation of the Compliance module follows shortly, prior to a further upgrade to Microsoft Exchange 2007.
 
Mark summarises the experience: “It’s unusual that a solution delivers all that it promises – ArchiveOne has saved us money in the reduction of storage and significantly reduced the management overhead.”