MailShadow OnSite

Customer Challenges

The IT department's vision has been to deliver email that never fails. In the past, the entire process of using standby servers, performing backups and re-building servers was both time consuming and tedious. Managing Microsoft Exchange servers also required a lot of IT maintenance and scheduled downtime. In the meantime, users expected their email to work all the time.

Solution

This investment services company maintains a primary production site and a separate disaster recovery (DR) site to deliver comprehensive data protection and security. Each site houses blade servers with networked storage for full redundancy. The messaging servers run Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 with 310 mailbox users. To support the company's 160 Blackberry users, the IT infrastructure also includes a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) server at each facility. MailShadow OnSite software complements this environment by providing real-time email replication, continuous email protection, rapid email data failover and instant recovery.

Benefits

Although the AVP, Infrastructure Ops researched different email continuity solutions, only MailShadow OnSite addressed all the comprehensive needs of his organization. To deliver the best email experience for his clients, he needed the precision to fail over specific mailboxes using pre-defined criteria. For example, if there were a performance issue with just one mailbox or storage group, the IT department could isolate and fail over the relevant user(s) to address the situation quickly and efficiently. MailShadow OnSite is unique in providing this critical level of granularity with its powerful failover capabilities. Another major advantage with MailShadow has been the full visibility to track and see what's going on because everything is live on the server. With other replication solutions, the IT group could not be sure that the server would be up. Finally, because of its large population of Blackberry users, MailShadow's support of BES Server has saved time and effort, since no extra work is required to get disaster recovery.

"MailShadow rocks! It provides everything I need for robust email replication, continuous protection, and fast recovery in the event of any failure," said the Assistant VP. "I've also been delighted with the outstanding quality and professionalism of Cemaphore Systems' support. It's reassuring to do business with a company that you can count on."