E-mail has become a vital and indispensable aspect of our modern business processes. It has been recognised as such by legislation that defines e-mail as a form of business communication that has contractual legitimacy, and which can be invoked in the course of forensic investigations.
Then, of course, there are the everyday business applications where you have to find and retrieve past communications in the course of your work. These drivers require business to keep track of enormous volumes of e-mail communications, which can become a logistical quagmire if you don't have the right management systems in place.
SCS Africa is offering its clients a dedicated e-mail storage management solution that it has successfully tried and tested in the corporate environment. Faced with the challenges of e-mail archiving and storage, SCS Africa came up with the IBM DB2 CommonStore for Lotus Domino and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Solutions.
As SCS Africa DB2 CommonStore expert Maarten Raeymaakers says: "International business is changing from conventional means of communication such as mail, telex, fax and phone to e-mail. This means more users and more e-mails. Message archiving is growing continuously, which requires more disk space, more and larger servers, more maintenance and backups and message archiving."
IBM DB2 CommonStore provides a flexible but orderly way for companies to maintain complete and accurate e-mail records. This enhances business productivity and legislative compliance. More than this, IBM DB2 CommonStore also provides the first step towards a broader content management solution for company data.
As Raeymaakers explains: "Message archiving is often achieved through conventional means such as periodically asking employees to clean-up their inboxes. But while the common first approach is to require employees to keep their mailboxes at a minimum, this results in a waste of resources in terms of time and energy spent on this task. You also run the risk that business documents may be deleted. You can also lose your history of e-mails and compromise the legal requirements.
"The solution is IBM DB2 CommonStore. It includes a standard option of 60 days live archiving, while the first year is available for fast disk retrieval. Up to four years are available on tape for online retrieval. The infrastructure is centralised for DRP, backup and restore. Early archiving of attachments and single storage is essential and on-demand retrieval from stored tapes is a plus."
Legal requirements mandate the retention of e-mail records for up to 10 years, so companies require an automated archiving solution to ensure the safekeeping of records with instant and completely secure retrieval access. At the same time these systems must free up enough network bandwidth for all business-critical online applications to continue.
Large organisations often experience system inefficiencies because of overly complex e-mail archiving rules. This not only complicates regulatory compliance but also fails to keep pace with the average 20% annual growth in e-mail volume.
Hurdles such as inadequate e-mail backups, expensive on-disk data storage, cumbersome archive search procedures and labour-intensive e-mail restoration are unnecessary snags that slow down your business processes.
The IBM automated e-mail archiving and storage system using DB2 CommonStore is a scalable, intuitive archiving solution that requires a minimal user-interface change to implement. It's also centrally deployable through the Lotus Notes mail template, which minimises the learning and roll-out cost.
The system delivers key benefits that will save your company time and money. You will realise annual savings in managed disk space through differentiated storage media as well as making savings on IT administration and maintenance costs. This will be accompanied by increased employee productivity and enhanced data security.
Case study: Safmarine
When Safmarine needed to replace an existing archiving system, CommonStore implementer Danny Vergauwens described the implementation of CommonStore in Safmarine's Lotus Notes environment as a journey through "a rugged and complex landscape".
"The topology of Lotus Notes determines the ease of such a journey," he says. "A complex Notes topology requires experienced Lotus Notes and Project Management skills: they are your GPS-system for a safe and successful CommonStore journey!"
Vergauwens says the nature of a company's Lotus Notes setup will determine whether migration is an easy journey. The Safmarine setup involved a dual hub spoke setup in Antwerp and Cape Town.
Some 46 regional servers connecting 1 100 users to Antwerp were coupled with seven regional servers connecting 1 000 users to Cape Town. There were 18 full mail servers and 35 satellite servers. The implementation was complicated by different setups in Antwerp and Cape Town, as each hub had different archiving rules and hardware systems.
Safmarine had an e-mail history that went back to 1997, which meant that huge volumes of data had been accumulated. There was a need to have different storage rules in place depending on the age of the data because old data had to go to offline tape.
Says Vergauwens: "CommonStore Implementation may require not only CommonStore/On Demand Skills but also high-level Lotus Notes and Project Management Skills. This will depend on the complexity of your Lotus Notes topology and replication policy, existing archiving solutions in place and the need for customisations."
IBM DB2 CommonStore gives ROI by providing 4.5 terabytes of disk space over five years. The CommonStore system keeps three terabytes of data current. It incorporates an integrated suite of products that assure reliability and solidity.
In terms of practical implementation, the message archiving project team should include customer representatives, IBM hardware and software installation together with configuration and training. SCS Africa provides customisation, integration and migration solutions based on its solid experience in successful IBM DB2 CommonStore implementations.
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