UK Exeter University Utilizes Archiving Solution From C2C

C2C Systems Ltd. announced that Exeter
University has adopted ArchiveOne to manage their 3,500 staff plus
associates and group mailboxes.

In terms of the IT infrastructure, Exeter University has 20 virtualised
Exchange servers split across the two sites that are either clustered or set up
as DAGs (for data replication). ArchiveOne is deployed on 6 virtualised
archiving servers supporting an email infrastructure, with more than
37,000 mailboxes contained within the Active Directory.

Like all academic establishments, the University in recent years has seen growth in the size and volume of email not only as coursework
files but right across the infrastructure, as departments have become more
reliant on large image-based files, PDFs and PPTs.

Dave Dickinson is the Universities’ Information Systems Developer responsible
for all email system infrastructure, takes up the story: "We were in the process of migrating from a
Unix-based email system. This was an effective, simple, pure flat-file email
system that was not particularly resource intensive, but it did not offer the
extra features, such as calendaring and workflow that we deemed as essential.
We therefore embarked on the move to Microsoft Exchange 2003 and then later to
Exchange 2007."

There were a number of changes that the University had to adopt as part of the
migration to Exchange. The first was to include performance shared storage into the infrastructure and the second was to identify an
effective archiving solution. Critical requirements for this solution
included both the ability to handle the increasingly large volumes of email and
the capacity to reduce the burden of Exchange which demanded far greater
resources than their Unix-based system. After examining three market-leading
solutions, the team opted for C2C’s ArchiveOne solution due to its flexibility
and end user experience.

With 7TB of primary storage assigned to run Exchange, it had been critical that
the archiving solution moved data to the archive
store reducing the impact on primary storage. ArchiveOne stored the files in a
compressed format so the demand on secondary storage was reduced as well. On
top of this infrastructure challenge, there was a cultural challenge that users
needed to overcome. The previous Unix-based system offered users unlimited
email space, so they became accustomed to keeping an unrestricted amount of
email. The transition to Exchange with its mailbox quotas had caused
users to implement PST files resulting in difficulties with backup and DR. The
installation of ArchiveOne provided the management team with an archiving
solution that meant they regained control over mailbox stores and quotas. A
solution of policy enforcement was created for staff and associate mailboxes,
comprising approximately 5,000 mailboxes.

ArchiveOne has enabled automated policies with two standard
policies in place. For average mailbox users, any emails older than 12 months
are automatically archived and compressed to an archive store. For those ‘power
users’ whose mailboxes regularly exceed 750MB, it automates an
archiving policy of six months. These archiving policies enable the email
system to run at an optimal 70% capacity of primary disk. For users, the
process is simple, they simply click on the email in the inbox, and the full
email is located and retrieved from the store.

For Dave and the team, the ability to manipulate and customise archiving
policies has proven invaluable: "When
we initially installed the archiving system, we installed five archive
repositories. Since then we have installed additional archives on an annual
basis. What we found when using ArchiveOne is that its policies were flexible
and adaptable to our needs. For instance, we would be able to move to a six
month repository cycle easily if data growth required, and we are able to
extend policies to individual users with no impact."

One of the benefits of archiving is reducing the impact of an
Exchange upgrade. Moving the majority of data to the archive before the
migration alleviates the need for the data to be moved when upgrading between
the Exchange versions. Since the majority of data had already been moved prior
to the upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2007, time and management overhead was
reduced. Indeed, so has storage capacity declined. Two years down the
line, ArchiveOne has alleviated the need for any further primary storage,
ensuring cost savings and fewer problems for the Infrastructure team.

For users with ArchiveOne, archiving is automatic, and now falls
within the blanket protection of the Exchange backup. With the majority of data
in the archive, the benefits to an Exchange upgrade have already been realised.
In 2012 the University will upgrade to Exchange 2010 and the benefits of not
having to move all the data will be realised. The process will be
relatively quick and less demanding on the University.

In conclusion, Dave comments: "Put
simply, I couldn’t imagine not having ArchiveOne operating seamlessly behind
the university’s email infrastructure. It is an easy-to-use, flexible and
valuable tool."