VAR Solves E-Mail Backup Problem For Teachers' Union
The United Teachers of Los Angeles could send and receive e-mails with no difficulties. But the staff of about 90 personnel were sending and receiving so many e-mail messages that its backup system started to become overloaded.
The UTLA&s backups were growing longer and longer to the point where one day&s backup was ending at about the same time the next day&s was beginning, said Don Carlos, the union&s director of information services and technology.
>> FOCUS: Nationwide consultant for SMBs
>> PROBLEM: The United Teachers of Los Angeles needed to improve its Microsoft Exchange e-mail database backup
>> PRODUCTS and SERVICES USED: Mimosa Systems& NearPoint software running on a Dell server
>> LESSONS LEARNED:
> Keep an eye on startups—they may have new point technologies suitable for specific jobs
> Watch out for problems caused by major updates to customer environments
“If there [is] a hiccup in our backup, it could become a big problem,” Carlos said. The biggest problem came from the union&s communications department, which publishes newsletters and often sends e-mails with large attachments, he said.
The UTLA has a small IT staff, including one network administrator and one SQL programmer, and had been using Computer Associates& ArcServe backup application. Six months ago, the UTLA switched to software from Veritas Software.
The UTLA continued to be overwhelmed and so turned to its longtime solution provider, Redwood City, Calif.-based All Covered.
“They were forcing users to save attachments on their desktops or burn them to CDs, anything so they wouldn&t leave them on the e-mail server,” said David Han, principal consultant at All Covered.
The union also needed to provide extra storage to its executives when necessary. “You can try to enforce quotas,” Carlos said. “But any time a director needs more space, you have to increase his quota or he&ll find someone else who can.”
The solution provider takes a vendor-neutral approach to customer problems by looking at a number of solutions and presenting only those suitable. All Covered then helps with purchasing and implementation.
Late last year, All Covered evaluated the e-mail archiving capabilities of Veritas& KVS line, EMC&s Legato software and the NearPoint software from startup Mimosa Systems, Santa Clara, Calif.
Han recommended the Mimosa appliance because of its low price and the company&s transition log shipping technology, which allows easy archiving and searching of e-mails.
When an e-mail is sent, it is written to an individual 5-Mbyte log file. Those files are then written to a database when Exchange Server is idle. Mimosa copies the log files and maintains a “shadow copy” of the Exchange database.
“This doesn&t change the way the Exchange client server works. But when a user needs to search for an e-mail, they only touch the copy,” Han said.
The UTLA liked what it saw and signed a contract for Mimosa in the spring. From the union&s side, the implementation was seamless, Carlos said.
From the VAR&s side, it should have been a straightforward implementation, as the Mimosa solution adds no software to the server or the client, but instead sits on a low-cost Dell server and watches for changes to the Exchange database on multiple production servers. However, All Covered had to work out one complication.
As a result of purchasing Mimosa, the UTLA started moving a few of its 15 servers from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 about the time Microsoft released its Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003.
Han said the multitude of events caused some conflicts and communication issues, and Mimosa&s appliance was not able to communicate with Windows. However, Mimosa technical-support personnel found the problem and worked with Microsoft to solve it.
The UTLA took another risk: A tight budget and a shortage of IT experience pushed the union to deploy the Mimosa technology right into the production environment instead of rolling it out first in a lab for testing.
That boldness paid off, Han said. Backup jobs that used to run as long as 20 hours per night now require less than 10 hours, while a search for an old e-mail message now takes seconds instead of minutes. And restoring a deleted file no longer requires scrambling to find the right tape.
For Carlos, the ability to search e-mails led to an unexpected benefit. “We can now search across multiple e-mail boxes to do auditing,” he said. “And we can do the audits without singling out a particular user.”