Logicalis developed a total solution for its own Email
Archiving problem and solved its customers' email problems in the
process.
Logicalis has the advantage of being a lot like its customers:
it is a successful business that grows by outperforming the
expectations of its clients. Like its clients, Logicalis depends on
email as its most basic form of communication, internally as well
as externally. And, like its clients, Logicalis' email had swollen
over the years into a tsunami of odd-shaped documents, old
PowerPoint files, video clips, sentimental messages from home,
100,000 messages about where to have lunch, a few lost nuggets of
absolutely mission critical data and a whole lot of miscellaneous
patter that has risen up like a gathering storm on the back step of
Logicalis and virtually every other successful business in America
today.
U.S. corporations have been made to look into this looming
maelstrom because of an assortment of federal requirements
including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SEC and NASD. Many who have stood
eyeball-to-eyeball with their own personal email dilemma have come
away shaken from the experience. Logicalis Vice President National
Infrastructure Consulting Eric Linxweiler looked deeply into the
email archiving challenge at Logicalis and came away with another
opportunity for Logicalis to outperform the expectations of its
clients: An email archiving solution that not only subdues the
email nemesis but also goes a long way toward accomplishing the
broader goal of comprehensive content management throughout the
corporation.
Rollout
Linxweiler rolled out the email archive solution within Logicalis
and it was frankly a daunting task. Logicalis has more than 450
employees who together receive an average of about 1.2 million
emails every month. Outlook PST files–some of them more than seven
years old–were propagating everywhere. Half the calls to the help
desk were coming from employees struggling to cope with their email
files on their own machines. Local hard drives had become like so
many personal attics, jam-packed with emails that got saved instead
of thrown out–the significant tossed in with the irrelevant. There
was no way to back all this stuff up, and retrieving a specific
email was becoming an exercise in futility...if not
liability.
As with most problems, the first step in solving this one was
facing it head on, and facing complex problems is literally what
Linxweiler does for a living. His job at Logicalis is to design,
develop and deploy complex solutions for major clients. Linxweiler
also had the advantage of being able to use Logicalis' Managed
Services facility as a development and deployment platform for an
email archiving solution.
Good news
The good news about the uniquely complex email archiving problem is
that there is a good solution that can be tailored to every
corporation. It's a three-tiered architecture: one tier for
messaging, one tier for email archiving and one for archive
storage.
The total solution that Linxweiler developed involved products from
several vendors including EMC, Microsoft (Exchange), HP, IBM, and
Veritas. It also involved high-level policy decisions, extensive
planning, and the recognition that email users corporation-wide
were being asked to make a fundamental change in how they use
email. Linxweiler, for one, had saved every email he'd received in
the last eight years. He had to let go of that. He had to accept
that email is not actually his personal property, but the property
of the corporation.
It wasn't easy, but by March 28, 2006 it was done. The tsunami of
undifferentiated email was calmed. When the migration was complete,
message storage size was reduced by 80 percent. All email was
standardized on Microsoft Exchange, and the PST suffix was retired.
The Content Address Storage capability of Centera from EMC
transformed retrieving important messages from a lost art to a
predictable science. Not only does the Logicalis email Archiving
solution meet all compliance requirements, but it also converts
email communications from an operational and legal liability to a
managed resource–from an attic to an asset.
Operational upside
"People look at email archiving and think it's only for risk and
compliance," Linxweiler notes, "but there's a huge operational
upside that almost justifies the project by itself. You decrease
the amount of time and effort to manage your email, you decrease
the amount of storage required, and you make future migration and
upgrades easier."
No technical solution is complete without support, and for that
Linxweiler worked with Logicalis' own Managed Services team to
develop the procedures and trained staff necessary to keep email
archiving running smoothly both for Logicalis and for Logicalis'
customers.
Every public company must comply with email archiving requirements,
but not every public company has the in-house technical support to
manage and support email archiving.
"We already outsourced a lot of our customers' Exchange
environments," Linxweiler notes, "now we're managing their complete
messaging environment, including the archives."
Logicalis Business Manager for Managed Services Kevin Clark says
support for email archiving is a logical extension of Managed
Service's operational skill set. The hands-on experience his team
has gained supporting email archiving internally for Logicalis, he
adds, gives Managed Services a level of expertise that companies
implementing email archiving for the first time simply do not
have.
"There is no substitute for experience," Clark says. He notes that
Managed Services has the additional advantage of having worked
closely with EMC to develop a full suite of support offerings that
can be tailored to fit the exact needs of Managed Services
clients.
EMC Boot Camp
Logicalis' close working relationship with EMC is only one of the
reasons that it is now the fastest growing EMC National Partner
with more than 220 percent year-over-year growth. Other reasons
include the 26 technical staff who were trained at various EMC Boot
Camps in Boston, the fact that 90 percent of the Logicalis sales
staff have been trained on email archiving, and the fact that
Logicalis' national coverage means that there is no place in North
America that isn't local for Logicalis.
The enthusiasm for the email archiving solution among the Logicalis
sales staff is a testament to the thoroughness of Linxweiler's
planning for the rollout at Logicalis. They are also more
knowledgeable about what it entails because they have just been
through it themselves.
From the experience with solving its own email archiving challenge,
Logicalis has developed two approaches to solving its customers'
email challenges: customers can choose to have Logicalis work with
them to develop a solution in-house, or they can outsource email
archiving to Logicalis Managed Services. Either way, Logicalis can
guarantee its email archiving solutions will work for its customers
because they designed them, deployed them use them, and support
them 24/7 at Logicalis.