They don’t just cover the nuts and bolts (and chips and disks) of the email servers, but look at all messaging in the organization. That includes everything from the MX records, the antispam service/software, the email footers/disclaimers, the email servers, the archive solution and PST files on the clients.

Yes, you heard me, it also includes PST files on the clients.

All to often I hear messaging teams saying the PSTs are a desktop team issue, because the file sits on the client workstation. Then I hear the desktop team saying it contains email so it’s a messaging team issue. Ultimately this just leads to no one taking responsibility for them and the ball gets well and truly dropped in the big gap between the messaging team and the desktop team.

This, flawed, strategy can work for a time, in many cases it works (or has worked) for years. The servers and infrastructure are all running fine, mail is flowing, life is good (while we turn a blind eye to the end users experience corrupt PSTs and lost email when their drive fails and the PST has not been backed up).

Where it all comes crashing down is when you get a discovery request – “find me all the email relating to X subject between this list of custodians”. Easily done for the ‘on the server’ email data, not quite the case for lots of custodians, each with lots of PST files. How many desks can you get around to in a day? Copying PST files from each one, having to find disconnected (no longer in use in Outlook) PST files some of which might be on the client workstation, others that might be on a fileserver somewhere.
It doesn’t take long for it to become obvious that there is a huge risk – remember you could have as much, or more email in PST files than you have in the Exchange server.

Are you going to tackle this proactively ? It’s not as difficult as you might think…

Carve out 10 minutes from your busy schedule and have a read of our 10 point plan for eliminating PSTs and then have a look at our PST Enterprise product.

Staunton’s IT group is also responsible for the establishment and enforcement of standards and use policies, and therefore needed to implement an email archiving solution to meet regulations put forth by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Additionally, they also required a means to efficiently search email data in response to internal investigations and requests for information by FOIA.

Challenge
Staunton’s IT group needed to capture and retain all email for a specified period of time for all employees and indefinitely for all elected officials. Further, Staunton’s IT group required a means to search email data more efficiently than mailbox-by-mailbox, and they needed to provide these capabilities to non-IT personnel.

Kurt Plowman, the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Staunton, set out to find a solution to these problems with specific criteria in mind.

First, the chosen solution needed to be transparent to the end user. Staunton’s IT group wanted a seamless experience for their end users; they did not want them to have to access or manage archive data differently from live data.

Second, the solution needed to be easy to deploy and maintain. Staunton’s IT group is a small team and could not dedicate resources to long and complex deployments or ongoing maintenance.

Third, the solution needed to provide discovery functionality that is easy for both IT and non-IT personnel to use. Staunton’s IT group wanted to extend search capabilities to employees outside IT but did not want to then be bogged down supporting the users’ search activities.

Solution
Kurt Plowman chose C2C ArchiveOne Enterprise after reviewing a number of other solutions because it met all their requirements and more. Specifically, it also provided additional email capacity reduction capabilities via policy archiving.

ArchiveOne Enterprise leverages the Exchange Journal to capture all sent and received messages and it supports retention policies by user, groups of users and other criteria. This enabled Staunton’s IT group to implement and enforce 1 year retention of data for employees, maintain data indefinitely for elected officials, and meet all email standards and FOIA regulations automatically.

Kurt Plowman also explained that an unexpected benefit of ArchiveOne Enterprise was the ability to archive email data, like attachments. This additional feature enabled Staunton’s IT group to archive all email attachments in the Exchange Information Store after 90 days, which resulted in a dramatic reduction of primary storage.

Further, the seamless integration of ArchiveOne Enterprise with Microsoft Outlook did not change how end users interacted with their email. This minimized Staunton’s IT training program, as well as disruption to the end users.

The solution’s ease of use extends to its administrators too. “ArchiveOne Enterprise is a ‘set it and forget it’ solution,” explained Kurt Plowman, about the solution’s easy deployment and ongoing maintenance. The intuitive management console made it easy for Staunton’s IT group to configure the solution and begin archiving.

Lastly, ArchiveOne Enterprise includes extensive search capabilities for IT and non-IT users. It supports key word, Boolean and date range searches for one or more users (mailboxes) and automates the collection and preservation of data for eDiscovery. The City of Staunton has not yet needed to execute a discovery but knows the process will be much more efficient with ArchiveOne Enterprise.

Results
“If I had to do it again, I would make the same decision. I can’t say that about some other projects,” replied Kurt Plowman when asked if he had any lessons to share with other IT groups. With C2C’s solution in place, Staunton’s IT group can automatically enforce email compliance and respond to internal investigations and FOIA information requests promptly and efficiently.

And, they also benefit from attachment archiving and are able to focus on priority projects because the solution is stable – all without impacting the day-to-day activities of their end users.

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WESTBOROUGH, Mass., – May 15, 2012 – C2C, a leading provider of email, file and messaging management solutions, today announced that the City of Staunton, Virginia relies on its ArchiveOne enterprise email archiving solution to meet regulations put forth by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). With ArchiveOne in place, the city is now able to automatically enforce email compliance and respond to internal investigation and FOIA information requests promptly and efficiently.

The City of Staunton is located in the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia and is home to more than 23,000 residents. The city’s Information Technology group is responsible for implementation and maintenance of city computing and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as training for all municipal employees and elected officials.

Staunton’s IT group is also responsible for the establishment and enforcement of standards and use policies, and therefore needed to implement an email archiving solution to meet regulations put forth by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Additionally, they also required a means to efficiently search email data in response to internal investigations and requests for information by FOIA.

When considering its email archiving options, the city identified five key priorities for its selected solution:

1. It must capture and retain all email for a specific period of time for all employees, and indefinitely for all elected officials
2. It should be easy to search in its entirety, not simply mailbox by mailbox
3. It must be transparent to end users without interrupting their daily productivity
4. It needs to be easy to deploy and maintain by the city’s limited IT staff
5. And, it must provide discovery functionality that was easy for both IT and non-IT personnel to use

After reviewing a number of email archiving options, the City of Staunton selected C2C’s ArchiveOne Enterprise. It simply was the best solution for achieving all of their business objectives. Yet, even more, it offered the ability to reduce email capacity requirements, thus saving on storage and management costs. One other unexpected benefit was the ability to archive email data, like attachments. This additional feature enabled the city to archive all email attachments in the Exchange Information Store after 90 days, thus further reducing primary storage requirements.

“ArchiveOne Enterprise is a ‘set it and forget it’ solution,” said Kurt Plowman, the chief technology officer for the City of Staunton. “If I had to do it again, I would make the same decision. It met all of our requirements and more. I rest better at night knowing that we are FOIA compliant and that all of our email data is securely captured according to our retention policies.”

“ArchiveOne is ideally suited for any public sector enterprise that needs to comply with FOIA policies,” said Dave Hunt, CEO, C2C. “It is simple to implement and manage and is completely transparent to end users. And, its extensive search capabilities enable IT and non-IT users alike to discover the information they need with ease.”

ArchiveOne is field-proven to help organizations with archiving, retention and the eDiscovery of email and files, while also providing advanced features for compliance management, intellectual property containment and storage management. ArchiveOne is completely transparent to users, employing a Zero-Training User Design™, and installs in about one hour. In addition, ArchiveOne provides secure access to archived emails through iPhone or BlackBerry devices and through the web and web service technologies for offsite workers. Advanced PST management allows administrators to discover, search, delete or consolidate PST files across the organization. ArchiveOne is not dependent on SQL databases, so it offers best-in-class flexibility and scalability while reducing risk, speeding backups, and improving system usage.

A live online demonstration, references from ArchiveOne users, and a 30-day trial are available at www.c2c.com.

About C2C

C2C Systems has earned the trust of its four million software users since 1992 by consistently delivering high-value, dependable core messaging system enhancements. Microsoft® Exchange, SharePoint®, and Windows® File Server form the heart of our commercial and governmental customers’ businesses worldwide. C2C’s ArchiveOne® product family is the trusted choice for their email and file archiving, eDiscovery, compliance management, legal forensics and storage management tools to enhance these platforms. For more information about the Company, visit www.c2c.com.

CONTACTS:

Andrea Hall
C2C
E: Andrea.hall@c2c.com

Erin Jones
E.S. Jones Public Relations
P: 704.664.2170
E: ejones@esjonespr.com

This product help eliminate PST files in a controlled and automated fashion, with multiple options for ‘how’ you do it – migrate the data into the users mailbox, migrate it into their archive mailbox, delete some or all of the data, move or copy the PST file itself.

Anyway, I wanted to explain some of the new features and how they could be used…

First up is ‘End User Self Service’. I’ve heard from a number of our larger organizations (250,000 or more PSTs) that they want their end users to be involved in the decision making progress of what happens to what data. To accommodate this we built a web based ‘self service’ portal that a user visits, where they see a list of all their own PST files (one currently in use, in Outlook as well as those discovered across the corporate network which, after automatic examination of the data, they have deemed to be the owner of.
The user can choose from a list of pre-created policies, which policy they want executed on each PST file.

Next up is the ‘Copy / Move Action’. This is two new actions that can be carried out on the PST file itself – we can copy or move the file to a target destination (typically a file server). I’m really pleased with this particular feature, not just because we managed to provide a wealth of options around what to do when the PST copy/move was completed – swap Outlook profile, delete source PST, rename source PST and more – but also because we were able to add some cool flexibility into the transport method.
For transporting the actual data, we allow 3 methods – SMB (file sharing), BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) and SOAP (Port 80/443 Web Services). We figured that SMB is the simplest if the clients can make SMB connections to the chosen destination , but then there could be firewalls between clients and servers so this might not be available. If that is the case then we fall back to BITS, but of course not all clients will have BITS installed, so in that case we fall back to Web Services and should be okay for everyone. It is pretty simple for us to add more transport protocols if needed, but I think this covers the majority of use cases.

Last but not least is the ‘Event Hooks’ we’ve added. The common theme I got from speaking to many customers was around the data they wanted discovered and reported about each PST file that was found. We had the core of data (size, location, path, owner, # messages etc) but everyone wanted another field reported that we had not covered (Client OS, last mod time, client memory, version of Outlook). In order to provide this, without having to code and rebuild the client on a case by case basis, we simply made the reported fields extensible and added a ‘hook’ so that clients could run their own script (VBScript, Windows Script, PowerShell etc) to get the additional data they wanted reported and then push that data into the process we use for reporting the discovered PST data back to the server.
The other hook we added is at the time when we are about to send a policy to a client for execution on a particular PST. Again we can run a script at this point and it allows us to override the Policy that is sent to the client. the use case for this is mostly around ‘exceptions’ – for example: I want all clients/PSTs to get the ‘migrate’ policy unless the PST owner is in X list of staff on Legal Hold.

Of course, there are a number of other improvements and new features, but these 3 warranted further explanation.
If you’re interested in more information about PST Enterprise then please visit our product page : http://www.c2c.com/products/pst-enterprise/

Seminars are May 15 (for US) and May 16 (for UK/Europe)

Click on the links above to register today

Time: 12:30PM – 1:30PM EDT

Topic: Centralize and control corporate email by eliminating PSTs

PST files continue to be a challenge for many IT departments, often resulting in lost data, lengthy back-up times, and increased corporate risk.

Participate in this interactive webinar and obtain a plan to:

• Discover and report on all PST files seamlessly and without end-user interaction
• Migrate PST data to Exchange, mailbox or archive, or move to a central location
• Eliminate PST files and data easily and systematically

To answer all your questions about PST management and elimination, reserve your seat for C2C’s webinar, “The 10-Point Plan to Eliminate PST Files.”

Reserve your seat now

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

WESTBOROUGH, Mass., – May 1, 2012 – C2C, a leading provider of email, file and messaging management solutions, today announced the release of version 2.2 of its PST Enterprise™ solution. C2C’s PST Enterprise is a strategic software tool which allows organizations to manage the elimination and migration of Microsoft Exchange PST data throughout their entire network.  It has now been enhanced with additional PST file move and copy flexibility and end-user self service to automatically accommodate even the most elaborate retention management policies.

“Most companies understand that PST file management needs to be an integral component of their comprehensive retention management policy, and yet most haven’t taken the required steps because when performed manually integrating PST file data into an archive can be a complex and time intensive endeavor,” said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “Our latest version of PST Enterprise enhances the automation of PST file management processes while offering the dynamic flexibility to support retention policies of every type, without taxing valuable IT staff resources.”

PST Enterprise allows organizations to easily and seamlessly discover and report on all PST files throughout their organization and provides the critical information needed to make informed decisions on their elimination or migration into an email archive or to Microsoft Exchange 2010.  PST Enterprise collects critical information on each PST file, before it is ever migrated or ingested, including its location, age, volume of data, size on disk, and number of messages. The process is performed transparently, without any user interaction.

PST Enterprise now includes additional flexibility and customizable features to support the retention policies and file movement needs of any organization: New features include:

• End User Self Service. Now, if the IT administrator wishes, end users can choose what policy they want applied to any of their PST files. Users can select which files they wish to keep and which files they wish to eliminate before the PST file is migrated to an archive or eliminated.
• Flexible Move Actions. Once PST Enterprise discovers PST files it can automatically move the files to a specified location, such as from a local workstation to a file server, for future management or retention.
• Flexible Copy Actions. Once PST Enterprise discovers PST files it can automatically copy the files to a specified location, such as from a local workstation to a file server, for future management or retention.
• Move and Copy Completion Options. Once a PST file has been moved or copied, administrators can select the automated completion options that best meet their retention policies, such as reconnect a PST to its Outlook profile, rename the local PST, or even delete the local PST.
• Support for Multiple Transport Modes. During a PST file move or copy process, PST Enterprise supports multiple transport modes to assure process completion. PST Enterprise supports copying files to a fileshare, the Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service, or standard HTTP web services.

Available now, C2C’s PST Enterprise v2.2 operates as a stand-alone product which can be used alongside existing email archive software products or in combination with the C2C ArchiveOne Enterprise email management, eDiscovery and retention solution.

To learn more about PST management and elimination, join the C2C Webinar, “The 10 Point Plan to Eliminate PST Files,” on Tuesday, May 15 at 12:30 EST. To register, please visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/887958448

To download a trial version of PST Enterprise, please visit:  http://us.c2c.com/demos-trials/free-trials  and request “PST Enterprise.”

About C2C

C2C Systems has earned the trust of its four million software users since 1992 by consistently delivering high-value, dependable core messaging system enhancements. Microsoft® Exchange, SharePoint®, and Windows® File Server form the heart of our commercial and governmental customers’ businesses worldwide. C2C’s ArchiveOne® product family is the trusted choice for their email and file archiving, eDiscovery, compliance management, legal forensics and storage management tools to enhance these platforms. For more information about the Company, visit us.c2c.com.

CONTACTS:

Andrea Hall
C2C
E: Andrea.hall@c2c.com

Erin Jones
E.S. Jones Public Relations
P: 704.664.2170
E: ejones@esjonespr.com

Overview
Stockport Grammar school is a leading co-educational independent school, founded in 1487, catering for children from ages 3-19 across the Greater Manchester conurbation. The school is firmly placed as one of the leading schools in the North of England serving 1,600 pupils and around 200 staff.

About the School
Mick Flaherty, ICT Co-Ordinator for the Department, is responsible for IT strategy, networking and procurement at the school.  He explained that a dual file share area had been established back in the early 1990s for both pupils (in a Read-Only format) and for staff to exchange resources.

“Since then, the shared system has slowly consumed vast amounts of costly primary storage and required significant ongoing management for backups and retrieval,” further explained Mick Flaherty.

It was not only the size of the shared drive that caused concern, but also the importance of the data held.

About the Shared File Area
Providing shared drives with ballooning data sets poses real IT challenges when it comes to ongoing maintenance and backup. True to the original ICT remit, staff have fully utilised the shared drive and have stored files without deleting redundant or duplicate files, meaning that the area has become wholly unmanageable.

Not only did images and notes still exist from staff and pupils no longer at the school, but large files, digital images and PowerPoint presentations increased the size of the store to over 3TB, largely in unused and infrequently accessed files.

With no file management and no restrictions in place, the resultant backups frequently spanned across the whole weekend and into the school week.

File Archive facility required
Mick takes up the story, “Our investigations concluded that we needed to identify a cost effective, easy to use file management system that could set automated policies and restore usability.”

A reconfiguration of the entire network, which spanned across two years, led to the school deploying virtualised servers together with a streamlined data set.

C2C’s ArchiveOne for Files was identified as a potential file archiving solution by trusted partner, ICT Solutions, to provide an affordable automated solution for any files that had not been touched for two years. The remit provided that after identification, the dormant files would be placed into the archive store to facilitate manageable backups.

Rollout Commences
Installation commenced under guidance from ICT Solutions, closely supported by C2C, with the software seamlessly deployed within a day. In the first month alone, the ICT team were able to summarise the effectiveness of the software on the shared drives. Once all the static data over two years old was identified, tagged and transferred into the archive, the shared file size decreased from 3TB to a manageable 0.7TB. 

ArchiveOne achieved this by routing static data onto the archive server and transferring it away from the 12TB Fujitsu SAN primary storage. Backup of the archived area was then scheduled with repeating backups to occur each month.

In terms of enhanced and efficient search and retrieval of information from within the archive, users have not noted any significant changes; files are still available seamlessly by clicking on the native icon.

From an administration point of view, the system requires minimal manual intervention and resourcing from the ICT team, as archiving and recovery are automated from policies established at the beginning of the project. To facilitate these policies and repositories, Stockport Grammar uses a simple annual structure that allows files to be stored, accessed and retrieved on a 12 calendar month cycle.

Since the implementation, ArchiveOne for Files has been reconfigured to identify files that have not been accessed for over 18 months and moves them into one of the two repositories, Staff and Shared created on the archive server.

ICT report that the backup window has also decreased on the shared area.  Prior to the implementation of ArchiveOne for Files, the backup would stretch across the weekend, often concluding Monday morning.  Now Mick is pleased to note that with the reduced data set, backups run seamlessly from Friday evening through to Sunday morning, leaving Monday mornings free to concentrate on ICT user support.

Mick summarises “C2C’s Archive One for Files has significantly reduced the size of the data set and therefore our resultant workload. The automation of files over 18 months old is a useful facility that has lowered both storage costs and management overhead.”

WESTBOROUGH, Mass., April 12, 2012 – C2C, a leading provider of email, file and messaging management solutions, today announced that data from its own recent study on PST inventory volumes in a typical 10,000 person organization has been cited in the Gartner research case study, “Creating a Safe and Sane Email Retention Program,” written by analyst Matthew W. Cain and published on March 5, 2012.

The case study, which looks at the best practices in eliminating local email archives and establishing a comprehensive approach to email retention, identifies that the most difficult aspect of email management is establishing and enforcing email retention policies. To underscore its analysis, the Gartner case study cites data from C2C on the typical company’s PST inventory.

The C2C data identifies that a typical 10,000-person organization might have the following PST inventory:

• 25,000 PSTs for current employees.
• 10,000 PSTs from former employees.
• Average PST size = 1GB.
• Total size of PSTs is more than 35TB.

Of these:

• 11,000 PSTs are on desktops or laptops (total size = 11TB).
• 5,000 PSTs are orphaned and have no apparent owner.
• 20,400 are on intended PST file storage.
• 3,600 are scattered on other storage.

“Most mail retention guidelines (created a decade ago) were designed to maintain small

server-side mailboxes so the IT group could meet backup windows, assure system availability and fast recovery, as well as minimizing the need to buy more disk space,” said Cain in the report. “Consequently, the compromise was to allow users to create personal (not server side) archives stored on their PCs or on network file shares. These small mailbox/personal archive policies were typically put in place when the role of email in litigation was minimal and the application of records management discipline to email was not a consideration. The consequences of this approach to email retention have been profound. In 2012, many organizations have large repositories of messages that go back a decade or more in personal archives such as Outlook PSTs.”

“As identified by the Gartner case study, organizations need to carefully plan and execute their email retention policies to successfully serve the needs of legal personnel, records managers, IT administrators and end users,” said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “The size of the challenge can be massive when you take into count the pure volume of both known and unknown PST files throughout an enterprise. Thankfully, PST remediation doesn’t have to be a complicated undertaking. By following best practices and using an automated solution that will discover, manage, migrate and eliminate PSTs based on company policy, it can be easy to serve each audience effectively.”

C2C’s PST Enterprise™ solution is a strategic software tool which allows organizations to manage the elimination and migration of Microsoft Exchange PST data throughout their entire network. PST Enterprise supports a range of actions once PST files have been discovered to help email administrators best manage PST data for simplified administration, eDiscovery and overall corporate data protection. The C2C PST Enterprise solution operates as a stand-alone product which can be used alongside existing email archive software products or in combination with the C2C ArchiveOne Enterprise email management, eDiscovery and retention solution.

To download a trial version of PST Enterprise, please visit:  us.c2c.com/product-demo/free-trials and request “PST Enterprise.” For more information on real world PST migration and elimination, please visit: http://us.c2c.com/solutions/pst-management

About C2C

C2C Systems has earned the trust of its four million software users since 1992 by consistently delivering high-value, dependable core messaging system enhancements. Microsoft® Exchange, SharePoint®, and Windows® File Server together with IBM® Lotus® Domino® form the heart of our commercial and governmental customers’ businesses worldwide. C2C’s ArchiveOne® product family is the trusted choice for their email and file archiving, eDiscovery, compliance management, legal forensics and storage management tools to enhance these platforms. For more information about the Company, visit us.c2c.com.

Contact
Andrea Hall
C2C
Ph: +44 (0)118.951.1211
E: andrea.hall@c2c.com

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 extensive email infrastructure, with 37,000 mailboxes contained within the Active Directory. In addition, there are more than 700 non-personal mailboxes that belong to societies, clubs and groups; with emails being rerouted into private mailboxes across the University.

Challenge
Like all academic establishments, the University in recent years has seen unprecedented 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 Information Systems Developer responsible for all email system infrastructure and administration including Exchange, Archiving and future email development. Dave, as a key member of the University’s core infrastructure team, takes up the story:

“We were in the process of migrating from a UNIX-based email system. On the one hand, 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 for staff and students. 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 Microsoft Exchange. The first was to include high-performing 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.

Solution
The team worked closely with a number of partners to identify the best SAN for shared storage and the best archiving solution. After examining three market-leading solutions, the team opted for the C2C solution due to its flexibility and seamless end user experience.

With 7TB of primary storage assigned to run Exchange, it had been critical that the archiving solution quickly and effectively 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 data discovery.

The installation of ArchiveOne provided the management team with an archiving solution for permanent users, which meant they seamlessly regained control over mailbox stores and quotas. A solution of policy enforcement was created for staff and associates, comprising approximately 5000 mailboxes. Students, deemed as temporary mailbox users, fell outside of this policy management and their accounts were set for deletion nine months after leaving the University.

Critically, ArchiveOne has enabled automated policies for permanent mailbox stores to be implemented. There are now 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, ArchiveOne 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 seamlessly 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 most significant 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 significantly reduced.

Results
The primary effect of installing ArchiveOne is that the University has, once again, regained control of its storage capacity and overheads. Since its implementation more than two years ago, ArchiveOne has alleviated the need for any further primary storage, ensuring major cost savings and fewer problems for the Infrastructure team.

Dave notes, “When it comes to adding new machines, the flexibility that the C2C architecture offers is impressive, via an easy-to-use GUI. That’s important when you are operating in architecture as large and complex as this, which is heavily customised to allow for the virtual servers and multiple archive servers. “

End users have greatly benefited as they no longer have to spend time deleting emails and managing their quotas; instead ArchiveOne automates the process for them. For the heavy ‘power users’ of email, ArchiveOne has been used to eliminate the PST files, while still allowing for extended mailboxes. With ArchiveOne, the archiving is seamless and automatic, and of course, 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 once more. The process will be relatively quick and less demanding on the University.

Support from C2C since the implementation was described as ‘outstanding’ from the team, with ongoing tips and advice offered throughout the project.

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.”

us.c2c.com
www.exeter.co.uk

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