Aegis Media

Company Background

By the very nature of its business, the media and communication services arm of London-based Aegis Group plc, is in 24/7 communication with clients, editors, and others - and much of this communication is conducted using email. The company's London office alone handles 4.5 million incoming messages each month and stores 1.5 million folders in its file system. Due to growing pressure to retain electronic information for increasing periods of time to meet both internal business and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, Aegis Media's data stores were doubling year-on-year. "In an attempt to get storage under control, we tried to get staff to spend more time managing their email databases and to use file servers for storing attachments, but, in reality, this simply wasn't happening," says James Morris, group infrastructure manager of Aegis Media's United Kingdom and Ireland operations. "We just had to keep throwing more storage space at the problem."

The Need

The company faced increasing costs to accommodate storage requirements that were growing 100-150% each year, and the IT staff had found that mailbox quotas and user guidelines were simply not enforceable. The challenge was further complicated by an upcoming migration to Microsoft Exchange from its Lotus Domino email environment. "Because another Aegis Group company, Synovate, uses Exchange, a global migration was inevitable," explains Morris. "So we needed a solution that would support both new and old email environments. Any information archived in Notes had to be fully preserved and accessible when we moved to Exchange."

The Solution

Aegis Media began searching for both an onsite archiving solution and an email migration solution. After an extensive evaluation process, the company chose Autonomy ZANTAZ Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) for Exchange and TransVault, an archive migration tool from messaging solutions provider and Autonomy ZANTAZ partner Essential Computing Ltd. "The ZANTAZ EAS/TransVault solution not only met but exceeded our storage optimization and email migration goals," says Morris. Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS provides centrally managed and administered control of email policies across Aegis Media's global network, enabling email administrators to selectively offload email and file servers automatically. Using EAS, approximately 10GB is archived nightly to the company's EMC Clariion SAN.

The Benefits

• Smooth migration to Exchange, with archived Notes data fully preserved and easily accessible
• Freed up four terabytes of disk storage space and cut storage requirements in half
• Reduced annual rate of storage growth by 75%
• Improves performance from email and file servers and significantly reduces backup time
• Reduces time and cost to respond to discovery requests, and meet evolving compliance and regulatory needs

Aegis Media first archived its Notes data to EAS. Then the company started its transition to Microsoft Exchange using TransVault. "With the data in EAS and TransVault to migrate it, migration to Exchange was a totally transparent background process, with no time pressures on the IT department and no adverse impact whatsoever on end users," says Morris. Using TransVault, Aegis Media IT creates a copy of the EAS-archived Notes data, converting email messages and, where needed, email addresses, to ensure that they will work in the new environment. Shortcuts (stubs) to the archived Notes data are put in the corresponding Outlook mail folders so users can still retrieve those messages. Populating these shortcuts to a 1.5 gigabyte mailbox takes only a few minutes and uses a fraction of the space on the Exchange server.

"We wanted to preserve transparent access to Notes data but without overburdening our new Exchange servers," explains Morris. "There could easily have been multiple terabytes of legacy Notes data moved to the new servers but, thanks to ZANTAZ EAS and its Single Instance Storage technology, we were able to free up four terabytes of data storage." That savings in storage space was not just a one-time occurrence. Using EAS, Aegis Media estimates that it has slashed the rate of storage growth from approximately 100 percent year-on-year to just 25 percent.

Using Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS has also enabled Aegis Media to cut its storage requirements in half, from 100GB per month to 40GB, and reduced the strain on its file and email servers. By reducing the overall volume of storage required, EAS directly generates capital savings in storage costs and email server costs. In addition, Aegis Media now has a much more stable and responsive email environment.

Because Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS centrally captures email messages, files, and attachments in a scalable, searchable archive and eliminates the proliferation of personal email archives distributed around Aegis Media's network, the hassle and cost to respond to discovery requests and audits has been cut significantly. "In the past, discovery requests meant sending copies of our Notes databases and backup tapes to a third party and paying for recovery of the information," says Morris. "But with ZANTAZ EAS' search capabilities and TransVault data conversion, all of our email, including legacy Notes data, is quickly discoverable - which is sure to save us more time and money down the road." With onsite archiving, Aegis Media has reaped additional benefits as well - from eliminating the fee paid to the application service provider that hosted its Notes application, to increased administrator productivity since every email-related task is faster and more efficient.