Educated approach to email storage

Iron Mountain NearPoint™ helps Liverpool John Moores University optimise email storage and mailbox capacities

Challenge:

Storage complexity and costs were spiralling in the absence of an effective tool to enable an effective email retention policy

Solution:

Iron Mountain NearPoint storage architecture with Disaster Recovery and eDiscovery options

Value:

A single platform for Exchange files offers secure archive storage while removing mailbox capacity limits and improving compliance

Client

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) is a major city-based university with around 3,000 staff and more than 28,000 students studying over 200 courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level. LJMU enjoys an enviable forward-thinking reputation built on offering excellent opportunities for educational, recreational, and cultural development.

Challenge

At LJMU, the IT department plays a key role in providing a rich learning environment: staff and students gain advantage from the latest technologies to aid their work and studies. A Microsoft Exchange email environment forms one of the cornerstones.

Students’ mailboxes are deleted when they leave. However, university staff members need access to students’ email records throughout the time they are studying at the university. At any one time, the IT Department has to manage up to 37,000 mailboxes to accommodate overlap periods as students leave and the new intake arrives. Without an effective tool to implement and manage a retention policy, the university’s approach had been to keep all emails. This resulted in over 1.5 terabytes of data on four Exchange servers replicated between two storage area networks for resilience and disaster recovery. Backups were conducted every night, with a full backup once a week and interim backups to tape on a daily basis.

“We were very impressed with the functionality that came as part of the core NearPoint product. It met all of our storage optimisation and Exchange recovery requirements.”

Kevin Walsh
Technical Director
Liverpool John Moores University

The increasing size of the database was causing severe problems for users as well as for the IT Department. Kevin Walsh, Technical Director at LJMU, explains: “We had to impose mailbox quotas to maintain a stable Exchange environment, which was extremely restrictive for our users. As 80 per cent of email is over 30 days old and referenced infrequently, we wanted to be able to move it on to less expensive storage but still enable our users to access it quickly and easily on demand.”

From an IT perspective, it was also important to reduce backup times substantially and, if possible, cut out the need for tape backups. The imposition of quotas had led to the growth of individual email storage files. These personal storage table (PST) files were unprotected and scattered across individual PCs. They were not backed up and were prone to corruption. When such corruption occurred users became frustrated when they were no longer able to retrieve vital information.

Solution

The university set out to find an email archiving solution that would give users unrestricted mailbox sizes, enable quick recovery and reduce overall storage costs. Five potential suppliers were invited to give technical presentations. LJMU chose Iron Mountain NearPoint because of its integrated architecture. “We were very impressed with the functionality that came as part of the core NearPoint product,” confirms Kevin Walsh. “It met all of our storage optimisation and Exchange recovery requirements. We will also be able to move our storage on to lower cost options and dramatically reduce our backup times.”

Using NearPoint means the university is not only able to archive and protect all of its Exchange data, but also has a single platform for both email and file archiving. This enables standardisation of storage, recovery, and compliance policies. “Implementing NearPoint will reduce the data held on Exchange by 75 per cent and also facilitate our planned migration to Exchange 2007,” adds Kevin Walsh. “Our users will be able to self-search across their archives using one interface, saving them masses of time and frustration. It was a truly compelling proposition which no other vendor could offer.”

“Implementing NearPoint will reduce the data held on Exchange by 75 per cent and also facilitate our planned migration to Exchange 2007.”

Kevin Walsh
Technical Director
Liverpool John Moores University

Value

LJMU will be able to remove mailbox quotas across the faculty and allow unrestricted mailbox capacity. Administrators can define policies that automatically migrate messages to the NearPoint server using parameters such as message size and age. Meanwhile, users have seamless access to migrated messages and simply double-click on an extended message header to view the message. Operations such as forward, delete, reply, and move, perform in the same way as they would with local message copies.

Moreover, users will no longer need to use PST files to store important data. Existing PSTs will be imported into NearPoint to ensure that all email data is managed and accessed within With NearPoint, recovery is supported at all levels. This includes full database recovery, mailbox recovery and individual message restores. “If disaster strikes, one click is all it takes to initiate a complete Exchange failover,” comments Kevin Walsh. “The Disaster Recovery capability is a massive bonus and is easy to deploy, as it comes as one of the standard product options.”

Another standard product option, the powerful eDiscovery functionality, will make it possible for an authorised administrator to search across mailboxes to retrieve data if required for legal reasons or to support disciplinary procedures.

Implementation was straightforward too. With such a large transient population of students it was vital that the chosen email archiving solution was transparent to users, and required no education and no software agents on end user devices. Users are able to search and retrieve emails through their familiar Outlook interface without any training.

Kevin Walsh observes: “It would have been virtually impossible to deploy agents to 24,000 student home PCs so it was important that NearPoint did not require any agent software to be installed on either the Exchange servers or the desktops, making implementation simple and quick.”

Although not part of the original specification, a spin-off benefit included the use of NearPoint to archive students’ Online Blackboard System virtual learning environment. NearPoint will also enable the IT department to introduce a formal retention and disposal policy oriented to internal requirements as well as regulatory, HR, and legal obligations.