University of Liverpool
The University required a solution that decreased both the backup window and helped staff members seamlessly manage their emails whilst allowing worldwide online access of email and attachments. After thorough evaluation against EMC, Quest Software, IBM and Symantec solutions, the University of Liverpool selected C2C’s ArchiveOne.
The University of Liverpool is one of the UK's leading universities. It is a member of the Russell Group of research-led universities and has over 4,500 staff and 25,000 registered students in various campuses. Within this impressive learning climate, Computing Services operates to support the use of computing and progressive IT across the University, providing services to facilitate research, learning, teaching, administration and communication.
Since 2001 Iain Stinson has been the Director of Computing Services at the University and is acutely aware of the challenges that the growth in email traffic poses:
“Email is the primary communication method for staff and students both internally and externally. In total, the University email systems supports 34,000 mailboxes and handles more than 8 million messages per month to 50,000 locations worldwide. On average traffic days, this breaks down to a staggering 400,000 emails per day. For university staff alone there are 4,500 mailboxes.”
With such volumes, it’s not surprising that email and its data is classified as business critical to the University – and it has always been treated seriously. Email records span back to 1982 when the University ran VAX/VMS and IBM VM/CMS mainframe services for its email. Generations of systems and enhancements have followed.
In June 06, the Computing Services team took the decision to move from UNIX based systems to Microsoft Exchange to allow full support of Outlook and Windows mobile devices. As with all the historical email migrations, the in-house team provided the tools to transfer users’ email to Exchange from the UNIX service, including calendaring and the migration of diary data.
Today’s email system operates within a secure environment which offers protection against major system or computer room failures.
The Exchange data is stored on two IBM 4800 SANs, one sited in each data centre with data being mirrored between the two locations. There are four Dell Servers in each data centre which support access to the message stores; each of which are clustered to form an active/passive two node cluster with a partner node in the other data centre. These servers are protected within a Microsoft ISA environment and are supported by a number of other server systems. Mail is sent and received from the external network via a number of other servers running EXSIM, a Unix based SMTP relay; these same servers also scan messages for virus and to reject spam email. The total active mail store is about 6TB, plus additional space for logs and archive.
Email Archive facility required:
When it came to archiving such a colossal email system, one of the major issues that faced the University’s staff email service were the requirements to retain files long-term and to have online access to historic collections of email. Some staff required large attachments (including images) to be stored within their messages, with each mailbox user having quotas between 200-500MB. Once these limits were exceeded many resorted to using PTS files which caused concern as these files were only available to the local Outlook client and meant that staff could not access all of the email from anywhere in the world.
So within the Exchange migration plan, Iain and his team included the requirement to provide a secure, fully accessible email archive facility for the 4,500 University staff. Computing Services were quite clear on their requirements. Initially they needed to reduce the volume of email so that email backups could complete in a more timely fashion. Secondly, in terms of management, Computing Services wanted to empower the staff to properly manage their allocation of email storage space. Most importantly they knew that access to the email archive and its emails and attachments needed to be available from wherever they were in the world. Lastly, the team recognized that it would be valuable to have a tool that allowed email auditing for selected users (and offices) that could be called upon at any time in the future.
The Solution:
Computing Services examined the archive offerings from a number of companies, and following a rigorous procurement process, selected ArchiveOne from C2C because of its full integration with Microsoft’s Exchange architecture. This was an important factor for the team who were reassured by C2C’s awareness, commitment and demonstrable history of keeping pace with Microsoft’s ongoing developments.
In terms of the solution, the ArchiveOne model neatly fitted the Universities archiving requirements; it left the archived items fully visible (where the user left them) and yet significantly reduced the backup time. In addition, the archiving policies offered by ArchiveOne were very comprehensive and included the facilities required for establishing effective standard profiles: e.g. “Archive all large emails over 6 months old; archive all emails over 6 months old that have one or more attachments.”
The Implementation:
To the satisfaction of the IT Team, the ArchiveOne implementation successfully occurred 4 months after the Exchange migration. The system was configured to operate within a watertight disaster recovery environment with archived data being stored on the mail SANs; and then replicated between the two data centers. There are two ArchiveOne servers running to provide a resilient environment for the email archive.
Extensive testing was carried out before the system went live, beginning with archiving staff emails within Computing Services to ensure that the correct policies for usage were in place. Roll-out across the rest of the departments followed. Staff was introduced to the archive and was provided with some reference web pages. The integration of a plug-in into Outlook simplified the user experience of handling archived email still further, and the web client provided a route for non Microsoft Outlook users to access their archived email (under the same archiving conditions).
Notable results:
The use of ArchiveOne has provided significant results. The number of messages has been reduced through the management of the data. The size of the online (active) information store has been reduced dramatically.
A large proportion of the data has been moved to lower cost storage and is held in compressed format reducing costs and storage requirements. The online store is now significantly smaller reducing the full data store back-up times.
In terms of future-proofing of investment, time rarely stands still for the University – they are preparing shortly to introduce Exchange 2007 to work with ArchiveOne. The Computing Services team is confident the archive system will work well with 2007 and know that if any “interesting challenges” should occur, that C2C’s support and knowledge stands right behind them.
Iain summarizes the experience: "C2C's ArchiveOne archive facility has benefited the University tremendously in the reduction of on-line messages and the active storage required, whilst allowing staff immediate access to emails and attachments, regardless of where they are in the world. It's a facility that we could no longer be without."