AC
Nielsen today has offices in Mumbai, Baroda, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and
Bangalore. The messaging in all
these offices is based on Microsoft Exchange servers. There are about 800 mail
boxes or user IDs across these locations and each receives an average of 40
e-mail messages a day adding up to a daily traffic of 32,000 e-mail messages.
As in other
organizations, the most affected application due to the information explosion in
the past several years was the messaging servers at AC Nielsen. The
unprecedented growth of mail store sizes made it challenging to manage the
servers. As Bhushan Akerkar, executive director for information and systems
technology succinctly puts it, “Our e-mail infrastructure holds our most
important intellectual property and is as important to us as water is to a
household.”
What the company needed
was an appropriate archival system at all concerned locations. The objective of
the project was to manage the flow of e-mail information efficiently, store and
quickly back up the data without compromising overall server performance.
Individual exchange
servers at the locations host respective mail boxes. In the recent augmentation
of the storage infrastructure at all the offices of AC Nielsen, automated tape
backup of exchange servers was also included to protect exchange data.
At a Glance |
Issue:
|
Datacraft's Email has
two servers-one is the original Email server configured with a high
performance storage system of small size, while the second server is the Email
archive server configured with a high capacity, low performance storage system.
The archive server
captures, indexes, compresses and stores all the incoming and outgoing mails.
Hence, all mails will also be available at the archive server. When the email
becomes older than a user-defined period of time, it is deleted from the email
server and a pointer is left corresponding to that email, which is available in
the archive server.
The project began in
January 2005 and was completed in four months. The team comprised of three
members from the vendor and one from the enterprise. It was an unbridled success
as Akerkar confirms. “The archival solution designed by Datacraft was the
perfect answer for our message server management issues.”
As the users access the
email archival server only in the rare event of accessing old mails, it is
possible to use low performance, low cost ATA as against expensive fibre channel
disks. This flexibility ensures low total cost of ownership (TCO), while the
storage size of the archive server increases. Using multiple tiers of storage
based on the age of information, thus lowering the TCO is the essence of the
Information Lifecycle Management strategy.
Bhaswati Chakravorty
bhaswatic@cybermedia.co.in