FSB Customer Story
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) are a long-term Cryoserver customer who wanted to better manage their growing email.
FSB have an archive with mail dating back to the late 90s, and have experienced rising email traffic, driving demands for increased quota allowances. After working with Cryoserver, FSB have made a 65% storage reduction in their mail stores.
Email Archiving Problems & Solutions
1. Managing growing email databases:
Before their implementation FSB were seeing their mailserver become crowded with information, therefore becoming slow and unresponsive. As fast as FSB put in place measures to slow the swelling of their mail store, the store would grow and problems arise again. They knew they needed a long term solution.
“The big thing for us has been reduction in the size of the database, we started at about 850gig we expect to be down at around about 250gig. That’s a success, as we upgrade Exchange we’ll recover that space. It’s a significant reduction, that’s for sure – we’re very pleased with that!”
“In the past we’ve tried to manage growth of the database through retention policies and things like that and of course it’s painful for the users, people don’t like retention policies and of course you go hard up to the limit and people start wanting more. Now with the stubbing process and retention policies and things like that the only real growth we’ll see will be growth in users, good from a future and a saving point of view.”
“By slimming down the database it brings benefits but it also allows us to do these other things.” Other benefits arise through the increased ease that a smaller database brings. For example, FSB found email management and in particular, migration, much easier by reducing the size of their mail stores on exchange.
2. IT dealing with continuous demands for increased mailbox quotas:
“The logical next step to manage growing email was to place mailbox limits on users. This created issues and took up valuable time for both users and IT.”
“The way we’ve been doing it so far is with quotas …it irritates the hell out of users and generates traffic to us, because as users get close to their quota they message us and ask for their quota to be increased. We know that they ask then and a year down the line they’re asking again. Quotas will put a break on it but they don’t solve the issue. “…we’re using the stubbing module, we’re working back in time from the oldest
attachments up to attachments from 2 or 3 months ago. We’re doing that on the drip so people get used to seeing their attachments as links rather than simple attachments. That alone brings down the size of the database to the point where we no longer need to impose mail box quotas.”
3. Dealing with mail stores dating back to the 90s:
FSB had a wealth of emails that dated back to the 90s. Storing this effectively caused issues for both financial and IT departments, particularly when it came to retrieval.
“I’ve been here for 6 and a half years, previous email archiving software was already in place when I joined. We’ve found emails archived back to the late 90s. There was also a lot of traffic from the early 2000s.” Cryoserver helped them to store the email data more economically and locate
information in that store more quickly going forwards. “Don’t forget those savings aren’t just once, as it stands we have 7 copies of that
database, so those savings are multiplied when you include the backups and the backups of the backups. We saved 7 times the initial reduction.”
Email is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So, finding a scalable email management tool to cope with this and allow your businesses to perform better with large amounts of data stores is becoming increasingly important. Cryoserver is an advanced solution to this issue, it can save you valuable time and money by making your email work better for you, as it has done for FSB.
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