Company Finds Second Time the Charm for Email Archiving

Peter Emmel, IT director at DeWitt Stern Group, learned a valuable lesson when the company implemented a new email archiving system: You get what you pay for. Initially, the insurance broker opted for an inexpensive system, but later found that its features, reliability, and support were inadequate, forcing a replacement less than 18 months later.

DeWitt Stern Group is an insurance brokerage firm with 200 employees stationed in New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Tennessee. In business since 1899, the company sells a variety of types of insurance but has been most successful serving the entertainment industry.

In the summer of 2006, DeWitt Stern Group started to look for an archiving system for its Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange email system. The insurance broker has four servers running its offices and relies on VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW)'s virtualization software to divide them up into a few dozen systems.

DeWitt Stern wanted to more efficiently store large attachments, such as images and lengthy documents. Employees had been managing their own in-boxes and in some cases were keeping all of their messages. As the data stores grew larger, search time became longer and server performance diminished.

Another problem with this approach was it created additional work for the IT department. Users accidentally deleted important messages almost daily, which the IT department had to retrieve via Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC)'s Backup Exec.As it was moving toward deploying an email archive, the insurance broker retooled its data storage system. After examining a couple of different approaches, DeWitt Stern deployed Plasmon plc (London: PLM)'s Enterprise Active Archive, which supplies read-only storage via a DVD-like medium. DeWitt Stern asked Plasmon to recommend an email archiving supplier and was pointed toward C2C Systems and NorthSeas AMT

After examining its options, the insurance brokerage decided to go with the low-cost approach: the NorthSeas Guard system with a price tag of about $2,400. By March, the product was up and running.

However, problems quickly arose. "We realized that the system's integration with Outlook was lacking, and it was difficult for our users to recover their data," Emmel says. Rather than a point-and-click option for restoring deleted messages, users had to access another Web page, log in, and then request that information be restored.

Reliability problems also appeared. "The NorthSeas system was not an enterprise-level product," says Emmel.

The situation didn't improve after repeated talks with the vendor. "Email archiving systems emerged quickly from a number of startups and, in some cases, the first few versions of their products had some flaws," says Michael Osterman, a principal analyst with Osterman Research .In January 2008, DeWitt Stern started to look at other options. However, a disaster recovery project pushed that idea to the backburner. In August, the email archiving evaluation process was begun in earnest and the company talked to C2C again. In October, the switch was made from NorthSeas to C2C's Archive One, which cost $18,700.

The implement was straightforward, and the system offered better integration and a simple point-and-click interface with Microsoft Outlook. The brokerage has about 6 TBytes of storage, with email messages accounting for about 600 GBytes of that total. The company expects to reduce its email storage requirements by about 100 GB by moving some files off line. The reduction is important because the company went to an all-paperless workplace in 2008, so there has been an increase in the volume of electronic data generated.

While the C2C system has worked well, Emmel would like to see one enhancement: better integration with Microsoft's Active Directory. Currently, the brokerage firm has to enable and disable users' privileges manually. Ideally, the company would like changes from the directory to be automatically relayed to the email archiving system.

Despite that issue, DeWitt is happy that it now has an enterprise-level email archiving system in place.