MailShadow OnSite

Financial Services Company Gains Robust, Economical Solution with MailShadow®

"Because MailShadow OnSite allows us to replicate only those mailboxes that are 'active,' we were able to save between $200-$250K in licensing fees and another $50K each year in maintenance over other solutions."

Customer Challenges

 

This financial services market leader serves the messaging needs of a large number of internal and affiliate members in its extensive retail payment network. This task is especially challenging because of continuous changes in mailbox users, with only a fraction being truly active email accounts. To ensure resilience, the company keeps all data on its premises with a primary production facility in California and a Business Resumption (BRP) data center in Colorado.

The company needed a cost-effective way to deliver email continuity within minutes in the event of any failure. In the near term, it also faced a scheduled 12-hour power shutdown for building maintenance but clients expected uninterrupted email service during this period.

 

The IT manager's stringent requirements included low solution costs, an easy- to- support infrastructure, and rapid failover to meet high service levels without requiring access to the data center. Another vital need was the flexibility to replicate only the active mailboxes in its vast network. Most email archiving solutions charge license fees by mailbox. Knowing that many mailboxes were not actively in use, the option to choose exactly which mailboxes to replicate would dramatically reduce total costs and provide greater operational efficiency.

 

Solution

 

The entire solution consists of two sites connected by WAN with HP blade servers running VMware® ESX, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 software, a MailShadow OnSite gateway at each facility, three thousand internal email users as well as five thousand affiliate users on Outlook 2007. Supporting over 1,400 Treo and BlackBerry smartphone mobile professionals, the network also contains one BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and one GoodLink Server. The company successfully implemented a pilot to transition the company from Microsoft™ Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 with the goal to have all users upgraded by the summer of 2009.

 

Benefits

 

The IT Manager investigated several alternatives to achieve these critical goals, but only MailShadow OnSite met all the prerequisites. Unlike other solutions, MailShadow provided the flexibility to track email usage and selectively replicate the right mailboxes based on server, custom attributes, or group membership. This efficiency resulted in eliminating the need to purchase new hardware.

 

Another major benefit has been the ease of deployment and simplicity of the solution. The entire process has been intelligently automated---from provisioning legitimate active users, de-provisioning inactive members based on pre-set criteria to replicating email data without user intervention. The simple design enables first and second-level IT Support workers to do their jobs without intense training or learning complex new tasks such as running cold standby servers or managing complicated redundant hardware.

 

During the planned 12-hour power outage for building maintenance, the IT department became overnight heroes. To prepare in advance, mailboxes were replicated the night before. The failover took less than five minutes, including the data from handheld devices. No user was without email and because of the smooth handling of email during the power outage period, almost no support calls came from the client base.

 

The IT Manager's Perspective: "The deployment of the MailShadow servers on our VMware ESX farm reduces the hardware costs dramatically while giving us the leverage of scaling servers horizontally as needed."