Fletcher Allen Health Care
Vermont’s academic medical centre resolves overgrown mailboxes and the risk of PSTs with MaX Compression, saving 40% disk space.
Environment:
- 7000 mailboxes
- PSTs & large attachments
- 3 clustered Exchange servers
- Migrating to Exchange 2003
Fletcher Allen Health Care, located in Burlington, Vt., is Vermont’s only academic medical center — a teaching hospital that links research, medical education training and patient care — and one of 125 in the country. The Fletcher Allen Health Care system includes more than 40 patient care sites and 100 outreach clinics in Vermont and northern New York. With operating revenues of $486 million, it is the third largest employer in Vermont, the second largest in Chittenden County and the largest in the city of Burlington.
When space management became an issue, the Windows team looked into C2C’s MaX Compression, a product that automatically and invisibly zips and unzips e-mail attachments sent/received from Fletcher Allen’s three clustered Exchange servers. “We have several heavy e-mail users with large attachments,” says David Haber, senior systems engineer. “One employee had over 3 GB of PSTs and insisted that he had to keep every one of them.”
PST risk
Although personal storage files (PSTs) are often used to manage mailbox size, they present difficulties for e-mail administrators and legal risks to organizations. Some PST files are so big that people couldn’t open them up,” says Haber. “When you get to 1½ GB it is hard to get the file open.”
40% space saved with MaX Compression
Haber knew that it is important to discover and archive PSTs before they are irretrievable. “The databases are getting too big for reasonable recovery in a disaster situation. Before we started our archiving project, I thought it would be good to decrease the size of what they have,” he says, noting that Fletcher Allen Health Care has more than 7,000 mailboxes. “We got 40 percent of space back by using MaX Compression. And it is seamless — no one notices that the product is there. The attachment icon looks the same, it works with Outlook, and it works with Outlook Web Access. MaX Compression has been a really great product for us.”
The limitless mailbox
After installing Exchange 2003, Haber and the Windows team will start Fletcher Allen’s archiving project using Archive One Policy from C2C. Archive One Policy includes a personal storage file (PST) option to discover, index and archive all PST files just like any other e-mail message. Haber plans to archive more than 300 GB of PST files. “For certain users, it will appear that they will have unlimited space,” says Haber. “No more ‘reaching limits’ messages.”
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