You’ve got mail!

The Portsmouth Grammar School (PGS) has adopted C2C’s ArchiveOne to bolster staff mailboxes and reduce the size of the email store achieving significant storage cost reductions. With onsite facilities that equal that of most universities, PGS is one of the leading schools in the South of England with over 1,600 pupils and 250 staff.

Trevor Barker, Network Manager, PGS, explained the problem. “We have extended the provision of email over the past few years and we now provide around 2,500 mailboxes across the School to staff, senior school pupils and parents. With unlimited capacity for staff, we were finding that we were consuming vast amounts of costly primary disk storage. We had already embraced a virtualised environment to reduce hardware and ease management overheads, so this disk expansion flew in the face of the virtualised strategy whilst having a negative knock-on effect for backups.”

It was not only the size of the mailbox store that caused concern, it was also the importance of the material held within. Mailboxes started to bulge with irreplaceable pupil coursework submissions; PPTs, lesson notes and images. For compliance with Data Protection, data created on email is kept for 8 years resulting in a mailbox store of more than 500GB. E-discovery could only be achieved on an ‘as needed’ basis, via a potentially labour intensive search locating the appropriate tapes.

PGS searched for an automated archiving solution selecting C2C’s ArchiveOne Enterprise based on usability and value. ArchiveOne was installed prior to the upgrade to Microsoft Exchange 2010, minimizing the impact of the upgrade by deleting unwanted email data at source and moving older data to the archive where it was secured and compressed and did not need migrating. This freed up more storage and significantly reduced migration time and complexity. Further benefits manifested after the migration, reducing storage meant reduced backup complexity with PGS being able to reduce their primary storage by 50% Backup windows were also significantly reduced. Previously, backups could span across the entire weekend, and take a full week to migrate to tape, now with ArchiveOne’s automation in place, the backup window spans less than a couple of hours.

Staff have not noted any significant changes in their Inbox; all emails are still available from their usual place. Around a third of staff are mobile laptop users where Outlook Archive files (PSTs) can be unprotected and cause compliance issues. These PST files have been automatically discovered and ingested into ArchiveOne reducing risk and points of failure. From a management point of view, PGS are pleased to note that ArchiveOne requires minimal manual intervention working quietly in the background, facilitating pre-established archiving and recovery policies taking any mail that has not been accessed for 13 months and storing it in the relevant annual repository.

Trevor summarises the use of ArchiveOne: "C2C's ArchiveOne has had a positive effect at The Portsmouth Grammar School reducing costly disk storage by at least 50% and generally making our support roles more comfortable with reduced backup windows, easy migration and demonstrable compliance. All that amounts to significant peace of mind.”

Using ArchiveOne, Portsmouth Grammar School have achieved:-
Capacity Management
??? Improved email system performance as redundant mails come off the Exchange server
??? Reduction of mailbox and Information Store size
??? Reduction of backup window times
Migration to Exchange 2010
??? Reduction of the volume of data to migrate
??? Reduction of migration timescales by reducing the scale and complexity
Compliance
??? Reduction of the legal risks associated with emails demonstrating e-discovery
??? Ability to store, search and retrieve emails – within set deadlines to fulfil Data Protection
??? Ability to provide secure and audited trails of email activity when required.