Smarsh Implements 3par

Smarsh, Inc., a managed service company in email archiving and compliance solutions, has implemented 3PAR InServ Storage Servers to manage growth while providing customers with secure and consistent access to email records in seconds. With single-archive implementations containing more than 1.5 billion emails, Smarsh has built state-of-the-art data centers that provide scalability to meet the demands of its growing customer base.

The company’s geographically-dispersed data centers currently archive more than 100 million emails per month, with a 300 percent year-over-year growth in data volume, due to a growing client base and overall growth in business email volumes. In order to manage this growth, Smarsh has invested in a scalable 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure that can grow with its business – increasing performance and agility levels amidst exponential increases in archived data and users – while continuing to provide customers with consistent service.

"Business is becoming increasingly reliant on electronic communication methods, and we’ve seen firsthand the rapidly increasing volume of email traffic," said Stephen Marsh, CEO and founder of Smarsh. "As a hosted service provider, our data centers are the backbone of the services we provide. We managed a long and extensive evaluation process and invested heavily in our data centers to ensure that our customers can access their email archives quickly and securely whenever they need them."

Commitment to Reliability amid Exponential Growth
Smarsh invested in 3PAR’s industry-leading InServ Storage Servers to provide the foundation of its secure cloud infrastructure. 3PAR’s InSpire Architecture provides Smarsh with the ability to mix storage tiers and protocols within the same system, and the platform’s autonomic tiering capabilities enable rapid response to changing business conditions for maximum performance at all times. Smarsh also leverages 3PAR’s unique architecture to easily and predictably adapt to changing application workloads, and to non-disruptively add Controller Nodes to the system to scale with its growing business (without degradation to performance). Smarsh customers, in turn, benefit with quick, reliable and secure access to their archived data.

With billions of email messages being sent daily, the need to properly index, retrieve, store and protect these electronic records is at the heart of the maturing worldwide regulatory environment. For example, in the financial services industry, compliance officers may be tasked with quickly producing electronic records for examiners. In legal proceedings, the timeframe for e-discovery can be short.

With Fortune 1000 companies and 40 percent of the largest broker-dealers in the country – as identified by Financial Planning magazine – as clients, Smarsh has earned the trust of organizations across a variety of industries and practices as a reliable and secure Software-as-a-Service provider. Businesses that invest in Smarsh are able to proactively manage and mitigate risk with critical on-demand access to their communications archive.