Businesses struggling with huge increases in e-mail use and the costs of migrating to Exchange 2003 should stop throwing servers at the problem and consider moving to a centralised storage environment to try and alleviate the pressures on their business.
That’s the message from storage giant EMC as e-mail becomes a mission-critical application for many smaller businesses, making the issue of how they handle and protect their email data a growing priority.
“They can receive orders through email and often it’s holding data that’s critical for their business,” said EMC Ireland country manager Colm O’Neill. “Also, with the increasing regulatory burden, they need to be able to store it and prove it has not been tampered with.”
Many were also wrestling with the need to migrate from older versions of Exchange to Exchange 2003. “They soon find there’s a significant increase in the number of servers they have to deploy to manage an equivalent environment,” O’Neill claimed.
Experience in the UK showed there were likely to be significant numbers of customers with similar issues in Ireland, he suggested. Many would not have considered storage as an option “because they would have thought it too expensive. But many were surprised at how low the cost could be, especially as the investment often pays for itself in under 12 months”.
He stressed the viability of archiving as a way to improve back up. The window for back up was getting ever shorter and archiving enabled companies to make the system more efficient. For example, if an email was sent to a number of employees in the company with the same attachment, archiving could allow you to save the attachment once instead of backing it up with every email that had been sent.
On the subject of centralised storage, O’Neill claimed it offered benefits compared to server-based storage. “There was a company in the UK that used to have 14 servers to run its Exchange system. When we centralised the storage, it was able to run Exchange on four. There was also a reduction in licensing costs and management costs as a result.””
Although many might be deterred by the price tag of “under €30,000” for a centralised storage system, he argued that when customers worked out how much they were saving on Exchange, servers, the back up environment and people dedicated to the process, they would be able to see the benefits.
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