UK Legal Firm Blakemores Solicitors Selects C2C ArchiveOne

C2C announced that Blakemores Solicitors, one of the largest legal firms within the West Midlands, has selected ArchiveOne to service its 250 staff mailboxes.

With a history that spans some fifty years, the firm is recognised for providing leading edge legal advice across all litigation fields; from personal injury to family to employment law. The firm is based largely from two main head offices in Central Birmingham and Leamington Spa. Recently the firm launched a new type of innovative legal service – Lawyers2you – which brings legal advice direct to consumers, when and where they want it, across 21 high footfall sites like popular shopping centres across the West Midlands.
 
Since 2004, the firm has actively facilitated expansion with business growth of around 30% year on year. This, in addition to burgeoning data growth rates as email became the accepted primary business communication, has led to significant pressures on the size of the email store and the need to allocate significant sums of costly primary disk.
 
Chris Dalkin is the Infrastructure Specialist at Blakemores working within an IT Team of 7 and is responsible for all aspects of server, desktop, network and email support. As such, he elaborates on the challenges facing email running on their Microsoft Exchange 2003 environment: "We were experiencing a quadrupling of growth in our Archiving store, which was causing a detrimental effect to the full backup window that as a result frequently spanned across two days. We were doing this previously through Windows NT’s standard backup, which although satisfactory, it was cumbersome for retrieval searching of the entire mailstore and it placed significant demands on expensive primary storage."
 
As a knock-on, users experienced occasional mild delays in performance of Exchange and in retrieval of files. The delay was not so significant to cause a reduction in employee performance, more inconvenience. However it was still a situation that Chris and the team wished to resolve. So in the summer of 2010, Chris began his search to find a watertight solution that could facilitate easy, user driven archiving across an archive store that spanned 20 years. (As solicitors Blakemores take the decision to archive all emails almost indefinitely). To reduce the backup window on the Microsoft Exchange server, Chris wanted to identify a solution that facilitated compression to reduce the size of the mailbox store for the daily backup.  C2C had come to  Blakemores’ attention through a speculative information call a few years prior. The C2C team had kept in touch and happily supplied trial versions of ArchiveOne. Other competitors also sent their evaluations, but the team were immediately encouraged to explore ArchiveOne in greater depth as it seemed to be so easy to use and manage.
 
Chris takes up the story: "From the trial onwards we suspected that we had identified the right solution with ArchiveOne Enterprise. We were looking for a solution that any member of our IT team could use and run with. It is Windows based, therefore familiar and Wizard driven. It therefore compared favourably with some of the solutions in the marketplace that we trialled that were so complex, that you needed a degree in programming just to set up an archive."
 
The other main differentiator which ArchiveOne offered was the ability to service remote users. With the launch of Lawyers2you, a team of 20 remote Blakemores legal advisors man consumer advice pods each and every day with iPhones being their only method of communication. With iPhones and indeed iPad users, access can be gained to their archived email whilst on the move. The firm’s Partners also relish this mobile functionality.
 
The solution in action:
After a phased rollout that commenced in December and with minimal user training, ArchiveOne was installed within the data centre at Birmingham. Three months down the line, Blakemores 250 mailbox users now benefit from easy-to-use search and retrieval. Before the installation of ArchiveOne, the IT department relied on standard NT backup to search through thousands of emails in their individual stores, which was time consuming. Now message links within Outlook seamlessly point them to an archive store, and users can automatically pull items displaying the ‘A’ for Archive symbol, within seconds. In fact, using ArchiveOne, Blakemores can perform a ‘pre-archive’ search for data at a rate of over one million messages an hour.

Not only are retrieval speeds increased, ArchiveOne also applies policies to data before it is ingested into the archive index. This feature prevents Blakemores from retaining unnecessary or unwanted data, saving costs and capacity. Utilization of the inherent compression tools within ArchiveOne, has reduced the size of the email store by over 50%.

Chris comments:" Reduction of the store is the obvious effect although there have been significant improvements in terms of the general speed and performance of Exchange. The available disk space on the primary store has also flexibly future proofed the viability of the mail server – even as data continues to grow we can easily change the archive policy from 12 months down to 6 months or even 3 months."

The backup window for the email server has now moved from a two day and frequently full weekend window to a manageable 6 ½  hours each day. Single year repositories with resultant migrated stores less than a third of the size of the previous stores have been created, with new repositories  manually created each year as recurring archive actions from within ArchiveOne.  
 
In such a litigious environment, compliance is important. To this end, ArchiveOne has set the cornerstone for a compliance procedure within Blakemores, as emails can now be demonstrably and securely tracked, stored and received. This means, for example, if an employee leaves Blakemores, a full email trail can be shown using the e-Policy templates that meet regulatory requirements.

"ArchiveOne is scalable, flexible, easy to manage and has significantly reduced our storage overhead. No matter how many mailboxes or data we throw at it, it continues to scale effectively and allows us to respond quicker. That’s an all round success," concludes Chris.