Insurer Eases Email Burden

U.K. insurance firm Thomas Miller & Co. Ltd. expects to slash the cost of storing its emails by nearly half and ease the strain on its IT staff, thanks to new email management software deployed in its London data center.

Given that the insurance industry is one of the most tightly regulated markets in terms of compliance and data retention, it comes as no surprise that management of information is top priority for Thomas Miller.

Insurance companies are legally required to keep all email for seven years. With some employees mailboxes straining under the weight of 30,000 emails, systems were slow and the IT staff were spending much of their time searching for misplaced messages.

But messaging consultancy Integritis Ltd. examined the problem last summer and proposed EmailXtender from Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) as the solution. Although perhaps not as glamorous as the 5th Cavalry, the software was deployed in late 2003 to capture emails across six Lotus Domino and five HP/Compaq servers.

Thomas Miller’s IT services manager, Richard Lewin, and his staff are now looking forward to a much easier life. “Going forward, it will really reduce the amount of time that the Notes administrators are spending ‘firefighting’ disk storage space problems,” Lewin says.The fact that fewer emails are kept on the mail servers means that storage costs and backup times have been reduced. Lewin says, “From the tests we ran, we expect that it will be a 46 percent savings in storage space.” Although he was unable to reveal the value of the Legato deal, he expects to see an 18-month return on investment.

EmailXtender sets rules that determine how, when, and which emails are archived automatically by the system. It also uses a technology called "single object storage," which removes the need to archive multiple copies of the same message and its attachments sent within the company. Instead, EmailXtender stores the message and attachment once and provides users with a link to the single mail.

Currently, the software captures all emails passing through Thomas Miller’s London head office, and there are plans to extend the system to the company’s 12 global offices later this year.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum