Mediterranean Shipping Selects Symantec Replacing EMC Legato

Symantec Corp. announced Mediterranean Shipping Company has selected Symantec Enterprise Vault email and content archiving software to manage its ever-growing volumes of email and Microsoft SharePoint data. As a result, Mediterranean Shipping has significantly reduced both the size of its information stores and the time required to search for and retrieve specific records.

Mediterranean Shipping is the world’s second-largest container ship operator, with 35,000 employees responsible for more than 400 vessels crisscrossing the globe. The company was struggling to manage its Microsoft Exchange email stores with EMC’s Legato EmailXtender archiving software. After reviewing several alternatives, including EMC SourceOne, Mediterranean Shipping decided to implement Symantec Enterprise Vault in November 2009.

The IT team was tasked with retaining all emails that pass through the company’s Exchange servers, although the company is not required by law to do so. As a result, the Exchange store had swelled to 3.5 TB in October 2009, making it difficult for IT to manage the size of their Exchange databases and employees to find specific records.
 
"We moved more than 10 million containers in 2009, and each one generates several emails to a customer such as notifications of containers’ departures and arrivals and shipping instructions, so you can just imagine how many emails we were trying to manage," says Sergio Fedelini, assistant vice president, IT Infrastructure,  Mediterranean Shipping. "We need to retain email communications in case a customer has a question or dispute. We want to have all records of a shipment, and be able to quickly produce those records to help resolve any issues."
 
The IT department was struggling to manage the size of the company’s Exchange data stores and spending too much time helping users retrieve email records and PST files, which were created when users saved files to their own computers instead of the Exchange server. Implementing Symantec Enterprise Vault eliminated the reliance on PST files and dramatically improved users’ searches.
 
"We had literally thousands of PSTs and experienced constant problems with those files becoming corrupted," says Fedelini. "Additionally, our users were complaining that searching for older emails would take several minutes, and often the search results would be incomplete. Enterprise Vault has created a centralized archive that makes the search and retrieval process much faster and has enabled us to adopt a ‘no PST’ policy."
 
Mediterranean Shipping has implemented Microsoft SharePoint to improve collaboration among employees across all of its office locations. A SharePoint library receives instructions from customers on their shipments, including relevant emails. Enterprise Vault helps users find specific records quickly and easily, and enables the IT team to establish a records retention and deletion policy.
 
"The level of growth in SharePoint is much greater than Exchange, as we have SharePoint libraries with hundreds of thousands of documents inside," adds Fedelini. "Enterprise Vault enables us to archive and purge records in the SharePoint database or move data to cheaper storage, which has helped us reclaim 50 percent or 1 TB of primary storage. That was something that was very important to us when we decided to move to Enterprise Vault."