SAGE Publications
SAGE is a leading international publishing company of books, journals and electronic media. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology and medicine.
An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore. SAGE has a UK turnover of around £50 million per annum. Sales are achieved by subscription; selling in bookshops (and on Amazon); and from SAGE’s own website which has become an increasingly important route to market. This online expansion has meant that the company has become increasingly reliant on email as the primary method of communication, both internally and externally.
SAGE UK’s office and data centre is located in London’s EC1 district. The responsibility for providing a robust IT infrastructure for the company falls into the hands of a dedicated IT department of 4 that supports 300 staff and is led by Martin Watkins, IT Manager and supported by Ben Booysen, Systems Administrator, who manages SAGE’s critical servers and applications, including the Microsoft Exchange Server.
About the Email infrastructure:
The email environment supported 300 mailboxes on one Microsoft Exchange 5.5 email server. Until 2007, basic archiving was achieved through the use of a JVC IXOS 100-disk archiving library solution. Archiving policies were restricted to archiving anything older than 90 days and storing it indefinitely on CD/DVD.
Retrieval of individual emails involved the IXOS system linking messages; identifying the correct CD/DVD and retrieving it. But the team was not satisfied with this basic level of retrieval and access. Ben notes, “We wanted to be sure that we were achieving full legal compliance legislation when it came to quick, accurate retrieval of email files. With the basic CD archiving system it was, at best, difficult and time consuming to facilitate occasional requests from departments to locate an important email from say 4 years ago.”
Email volumes were doubling year on year. Of equal concern was the growth of attachments that had grown ten-fold as editors started to submit manuscripts electronically to the publishers. It wasn’t uncommon to receive single attachments of over 70MB. As a result, backups of the data on the Exchange server were taking longer, frequently lasting all night. Resultant performance and management of Exchange was becoming increasingly challenging.
From a user perspective, there were two major hitches. Users were hindered by rigid mailbox quotas which were set at 540MB, causing frustration. In addition, the present system did not allow for the remote access to support staff while out of the office and with the use of Blackberry devices increasing, this was becoming a real issue.
Efficient email policy management required:
After upgrading their Exchange Server last year to Microsoft Exchange 2003, the IT department embarked upon a project to optimize the volume of messages residing on the new server whilst allowing greater mailbox capacity for their users.
Martin notes, “The main driver behind the need to properly archive was an upgrading from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 to Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server. We did have an archive solution on 5.5 through the JVC IXOS, but the costs and time to upgrade to the new server would have been huge and message recovery was very slow anyway. To have completed the migration, would have meant that we would have to un-archive everything from the IXOS library and this would have entailed huge growth in mailbox and database sizes which we would have been unable to support.”
So SAGE, through recommendation, contacted and invited C2C to show them a demo of their Archive One solution as it seemed to address their primary need to cut down mailbox sizes. Martin notes, “We were very impressed with the demo and made a decision to go ahead largely based on that. Time constraints meant that we didn't look too hard at other options as we felt that Archive One would provide us with everything we needed.”
The solution:
In 2007, SAGE started the installation of Archive One across 300 mailbox users across the new Microsoft Exchange 2003 server. Archive One was set to provide archive policy management of greater than 60 days or greater than 1 MB in size, to be identified and archived using Archive One’s fast review technology.
The resultant primary repository holds 57GB with 1.96 million messages. Notably, thanks to compression, the size of the total storage has significantly decreased since Archive One’s installation. Archived volumes are reduced further still by saving duplicated attachments only once.
The IT Team was pleased with how seamlessly and easily Archive One was implemented taking just half a day for C2C to set up and install and half a day to train internally. Ben commented, “We were surprised at just how easy it was to manage and use Archive One. Within a day, not only was the whole system up and running but most importantly we felt comfortable managing it and setting our own policies. Even when C2C had left us, we found the GUI and instructions straightforward and first class support was always available at the end of a phone.”
Notable Results:
With Archive One running for almost twelve months, the IT Department has seen some interesting results when it comes to optimization of their Exchange back office. Daily backup times on the Exchange Server have been reduced from overnight to an acceptable level of 1 hour 45 minutes.
From a cost perspective, Archive One has transferred the costs of expensive Exchange Server disk space into a secure primary repository.
From a user perspective, there are still mailbox quotas, but these now reside at 850MB. To address the companies’ growing Blackberry device users, remote access to email is now guaranteed. Best retention and access practices have also been addressed – for when it comes to locating an individual email or attachment, this now takes less than 3 seconds.
Martin sums up the C2C experience – “Using Archive One has allowed us to dramatically reduce our Exchange database size whilst still allowing all messages to be available in a timely manner to users. It’s been easy to use and implement and has revolutionized the way we treat email.”