Musgrave SuperValu-Centra
Musgrave SuperValu-Centra (MSVC) is the retail franchise division of Musgrave Group, Ireland's largest grocery and food distributor and is responsible for two of Ireland’s well known retail brands. Musgrave Group was founded in 1876 and is now one of the two largest private companies in Ireland and the fifteen largest corporations overall.
Environment:
- Exchange 2000
- 500+ critical users at HQ
Time costs money in retail, and lack of responsiveness due to IT system performance can have a knock-on effect to suppliers and customers alike. As Stephen O’Herlihy, Systems Administrator says, “Email is a business-critical tool at MSVC: uptime is very important. We rely on email as transport for communications to our suppliers so we can’t afford for it to fail.”
In common with many email systems at the heart of busy company operations, growth of the Exchange 2000 data-store became a major risk issue that had to be resolved: at MSVC, a 250GB mailstore, taking 10 hours to perform a full back-up and a ‘ridiculous’ amount of time to restore, could not to be ignored. Some users, particularly senior management had individual mailboxes of over 3GB.
After contacting a local IT systems reseller and researching the Microsoft Exchange partner website, a short-list of 3 email archiving solutions was drawn up. C2C’s ArchiveOne Policy module was evaluated at MSVC with 2 other vendors’ products, and selected as meeting their criteria of rules-driven archiving to improve performance, invisibility to the end-user and ease of installation.
The reseller, a C2C certified partner, provided the software and one day’s installation consultancy. ‘It was very straightforward: quite simply the easiest enterprise install I’ve ever seen. It was installed successfully in a day, and we performed the first archive runs the next day.’ Stephen says.
Taking a 2-step approach to roll-out, MCVS has addressed archiving for 100 critical mailboxes of over 1.5 GB first and will deploy the further 450 at the two management HQ sites, once a supporting NAS project is completed. The first archiving run reduced the information store by 80 GB – an immediate reduction in size of around one-third.
Archiving rules are set to move messages out of the Exchange mailstore when they’re 2 months old, which works well for working practices like project teams; archiving runs at weekends currently but Stephen see ArchiveOne doing a lot more work in the future.
ArchiveOne leaves a message link in the user’s mailbox. As Stephen says, “User invisibility was important – users just click on the link to retrieve an email, so we’ve had no need to train them.” In terms of success of the project: “It’s hard to put a figure on, but in business terms, we just can’t afford to be without email, and with ArchiveOne, we now have a robust and high-performance Exchange system” says Stephen.
“I’d recommend ArchiveOne to any company with Exchange growth issues: the software does exactly what we wanted. Archiving is invisible to the user, easy to run and has resolved the risk and performance issues of our growing Exchange mailstores,” says Stephen.