Self-Service Discovery and Recovery

Ventura Foods is Now Assured of Its Compliance Readiness with the Iron Mountain NearPoint® Solution Systematically Archiving all Company Emails and File Data According to Policy

Ventura Foods is Now Assured of Its Compliance Readiness with the Iron Mountain NearPoint® Solution Systematically Archiving all Company Emails and File Data According to Policy

CHALLENGE: Ventura Foods needed a comprehensive solution that offered storage optimization, reliable retention, and disaster recovery for its critical archived email and file data.

SOLUTION: The Iron Mountain NearPoint® solution streamlined email data retention and eDiscovery processes while also offering extensibility for their file archiving needs.

RESULTS: Today, Ventura Foods has a discovery-ready archive and an optimized Microsoft® Exchange environment with increased performance and self-service user accessibility.

VENTURA FOODS: THE TASTE OF DEDICATION

Founded in 1867, the roots of Ventura Foods go back to the late 19th century in the richest growing regions of the United States. Ventura is the leader in foodservice margarine manufacturing and marketing in the country. Building on a tradition of hard work, quality products, and attention to the changing needs of customers and consumers, the company continuously expanded and evolved. By specializing in quality foods, including oils, shortenings, margarines, dressings, mayonnaise, sauces, soups and flavor bases, Ventura Foods developed a reputation for providing foods that consumers enjoy, while supplying commercial customers with ingredients for their success: products, services, and programs that enhance business and increase sales.

Today, Ventura Foods is meeting the challenges of an ever-changing world by applying the strengths of its commercial resources, the talents of its employees and the opportunities created by new technologies. Among its most well-known brands are Marie's® brand of dressings, Hidden Valley® brand dressings, and Smart Balance® Buttery Spreads. Still, one thing hasn't changed: the dedication to Ventura Foods has to its customers and the consumers they are proud to serve.

"What we needed was a purpose-built archiving solution that would manage email, discovery, and disaster recovery all in one solution." — Ri chard Ca rreon, Network Administrator, Ventura Foods

THE CHALLENGE

As a company committed to quality and excellence, Ventura Foods is focused on achieving compliance and eDiscovery readiness. It has had a stringent policy in place for several years to archive all of its emails and files for a minimum of six months. However, the data store maintaining its archive, which used CommVault® Data Migrator, was spilling beyond 12 TB and was growing at the rapid pace of 25 percent a year.

Not only did the company need a more reliable solution for compliance and eDiscovery, but it also couldn't sacrifice the performance of its production Exchange Server in the process. Ventura Foods needed a comprehensive solution that offered storage optimization, reliable retention, and disaster recovery for its critical archived email and file data while also being easy for employees and IT staff to use.

"As we began to archive everything for compliance, we needed a more robust solution," said Richard Carreon, network administrator, Ventura Foods. "What we needed was a purpose-built archiving solution that would manage email, discovery, and disaster recovery all in one solution."

"The Iron Mountain NearPoint solution was the robust solution we needed to manage email, discovery and disaster recovery in one solution." — Richard Ca rreon, Network Administrator, Ventura Foods "

THE SOLUTION

After understanding the limitations of its current solution, Ventura Foods evaluated other email archiving products, seeking one that would resolve all of their challenges. The criteria was to find a product that could manage emails seamlessly for end users while protecting that email data in a common archive for efficient eDiscovery and disaster recovery processes.

The solution had to optimize overall storage requirements so that continued storage growth would not be costly or difficult to manage – but at the same time it could not impact Exchange Server performance in any way.

Ultimately, Ventura Foods selected the NearPoint solution from Iron Mountain. The NearPoint solution met the criteria while also offering extensibility to meet the company's file archiving requirements. Yet, what impressed Ventura Foods the most was the NearPoint solution's unique next-generation architecture which does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange Server or user desktops. This ensured that Ventura Foods' deployment was seamless, without any impact on their production Exchange Server performance.

The Iron Mountain NearPoint solution gave Ventura Foods the feature-rich eDiscovery capabilities it needed for quick response to discovery requests and compliance requirements.

"The NearPoint solution was the robust solution we needed to manage email, discovery, and disaster recovery in one," said Carreon. "And because the solution was architected specifically for Exchange, it was a good fit for our company."

"With the NearPoint solution, we have optimized our Exchange environment and increased performance, while reducing the heavy lifting by moving data into the archive." — Richard Ca rreon, Network Administrator, Ventura Foods

THE RESULTS

Now that the Iron Mountain NearPoint solution has been deployed, Ventura Foods has seen a dramatic increase in overall Exchange performance because data is now moved into the archive rather than burdening the Exchange Server. The company's IT organization has also seen a significant increase in productivity because end users can now search for and find their own emails rather than calling into the help-desk. Finally, the company is assured of its compliance readiness because the NearPoint solution systematically archives all company emails according to policy, where they are retained, protected, and easily recoverable.

Key features of the Iron Mountain NearPoint solution that specifically benefit Ventura Foods include:

• Complete and Flexible Exchange Email Capture. The NearPoint solution's Continuous Application Shadowing captures not only Ventura Foods' messages and attachments but all Exchange data, including calendar items, tasks, contacts, drafts, and item histories.
• Integrated Recovery and Disaster Recovery. With full data capture, the NearPoint solution provides the ability to quickly restore data to Exchange in the event it is accidentally deleted or a site goes down.
• Advanced eDiscovery. The NearPoint solution's eDiscovery application provides the ability to delegate permissions and workflow to Ventura Foods' legal and HR teams to search, analyze, review, and export all archived content and to apply litigation hold at an item level.
• Mailbox Management with Seamless End-User Access. Because the NearPoint solution captures all Exchange data, customers can aggressively purge Exchange to save storage costs, while providing easy access to information directly in Exchange and Outlook® Web Access. "With the NearPoint solution, we have optimized our Exchange environment and increased performance, while reducing the heavy lifting by moving data into the archive," said Carreon. "Today, users can discover, access, and restore their own data. This eliminates help-desk calls for eDiscovery and allows us to focus on the business."

About Iron Mountai n. Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) provides information management services that help organizations lower the costs, risks and inefficiencies of managing their physical and digital data. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain manages billions of information assets, including backup and archival data, electronic records, document imaging, business records, secure shredding, and more, for organizations around the world. Visit the company Web site at www.ironmountain.com for more information.