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Mimosa NearPoint Makes Light Work of Monarch's Ballooning Email Storage |
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Monarch is one of the UK’s major providers of low-cost scheduled flights, as well as being a key supplier of aircraft to the tour operating industry. Leading engineering facilities offered by Monarch Aircraft Engineering Limited complete the Monarch operation. With a fleet of 33 aircraft, and employing over 2,800 highly-trained personnel, Monarch Airlines has recently celebrated its 40th anniversary and is the longest established airline still trading under its original name in the UK. Monarch chose Mimosa NearPoint™ to deal with runaway email storage, provide resilience to the Exchange service, eliminate PST files and enable compliance.
Monarch was facing a deluge of emails, with the number it received daily tripling in just over two years. At the same time, email store sizes had increased over 500 percent and its Exchange servers were in danger of running out of space.
“Because the Exchange databases were so huge, our email servers were becoming unstable, with increasing risk of failure,” said Ian Radford, IT network & information services manager at Monarch. “As well as a negatively impacting Exchange performance, their size also affected resilience. Full backups could not complete before the next working day began, meaning we were unable to protect our Exchange environment effectively. If a server should fail, it would take up to 36 hours to restore a full Exchange service,” he explained.
Another major issue facing Monarch was the hundreds of large Personal Storage (PST) files scattered throughout the organisation. “PSTs were the only method we had for archiving emails, but they are far from ideal,” said Radford. Large PST files are both unstable and insecure. However, because of their size and the small backup window, they were excluded from Monarch’s backup schedule, leaving them unprotected.
Monarch investigated several options for keeping the Exchange environment running smoothly, including adding extra Exchange servers, or increasing the disk capacity of the current servers. However, the cost of enhancing the backup system to handle the additional data would have been prohibitive and it would only have put off the problem by around a year.
Monarch concluded it needed an email archiving and high availability solution in order to reduce mail store size and get back to a stable and protected Exchange environment.
Monarch considered all the main providers. Following discussions with the suppliers and product demonstrations, it decided to evaluate Mimosa NearPoint and C2C against test copies of its production Exchange database.
Based on this trial, and the strength of customer recommendations, Monarch chose NearPoint. “It was a technology decision. NearPoint uses log-shipping, which does not place a performance overhead on the Exchange servers, whereas journaling, which is used by C2C, does,” said Radford. “We wanted a solution that relieved our Exchange servers of as much workload as possible,” he continued.
Ease of deployment—with no agents to deploy on the desktops—and ease of management were also major factors in this decision. Users can manage their own archived emails, which simply appear as items in an Outlook folder, removing the administrative burden from the IT department.
The ease of use of NearPoint also extends to its disaster recovery (DR) capability. Radford explained: “For a high availability solution with C2C we would have needed to get extra kit and build it ourselves. It would have been more complicated, and would not have been a supported configuration.” In contrast, the NearPoint Disaster Recovery option simply integrates into the base product.
By reducing the email store size and using new server hardware, Monarch is replacing six Exchange servers with just two; one in Luton and one in Bromley. Monarch also has a NearPoint server at each site, and uses Doubletake—a Mimosa technical partner—to replicate the log traffic between the two. This means Monarch can reconstruct the Exchange database from the archive at either site in a matter of hours.
NearPoint enables Monarch to achieve its goal of reducing email store sizes and providing a resilient DR solution for its Exchange service. At the same time, NearPoint gives Monarch’s end-users virtually infinite mailbox capacity and unlimited access to all their emails and attachments, even when off-line.
Prior to deploying the Mimosa solution, completion times for the full daily backups of Monarch’s email system regularly exceeded the backup window. Bricklevel backups, a specialized form of Exchange backup geared for individual mailbox and message level recovery, took even longer.
The NearPoint next generation architecture uses transaction log shipping to capture the content of the Exchange environment. This maintains a replica of the Exchange Server database on the NearPoint server and keeps it current through the use of transaction logs. That means transactions can be rolled back to recover Exchange stores, mailboxes, or individual messages.
“Rather than perform full Exchange database backups, we just have to backup the NearPoint server and databases. And as NearPoint permits item-level recoverability, there is no need for brick-level backups,” said Radford.
The PST Archiving Option of NearPoint also enables Monarch to locate and import existing PST files directly into the NearPoint archive for complete control and search capabilities.
“NearPoint’s automated PST Archiving Option crawls the network to identify and upload PST files into the archive, without needing user intervention. Indexing enables full-text searching of all PST data, including attachments, while single instancing maintains storage efficiently. This allows us to disable PST production and eliminate the problem entirely,” commented Radford.
“One of the reasons we were interested in NearPoint was its Call Home management system, which constantly monitors the archive and automatically sends an alert to our support team if it observes potential system issues. This allows issues to be proactively resolved before they become a problem and before end-users are impacted,” explains Radford.
Because Monarch holds personal information about passengers, it is subject to the Data Protection Act (DPA). Under the DPA, anyone can issue a request for access to information, and the receiving organisation has to produce all requested data within 20 days. The difficulty in trying to find relevant emails and communications between different parties from historic backups can be immense. However, the advanced search capabilities in NearPoint makes searching the archive quick and easy.
Radford continued: “We expect that there will be more regulations coming in, not less. The fact that we are ready for current and pending legislation is an added bonus. With NearPoint we know we can satisfy any future regulatory and corporate governance requirements placed on our email environment.”
NearPoint will enable Monarch to more than achieve its goal of getting runaway email storage back under control. “As well as giving our end-user customers virtually unlimited mailbox storage and easy access to all their emails, NearPoint allows us to move forward with an Exchange environment that we can easily manage and is fully protected,” concluded Radford.
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