Company: Aegisoft
Location: New York, New York.
Contact: Aaron Laskowski
Industry: Financial Software Development
Number of employees: 100
Products in use: GFI MailArchiver
 

New York-based Aegisoft is a leading developer of financial trading software and services and its products are used by over 90% of the bulge-bracket broker dealers in the U.S. When available storage capacity on their Exchange server started reaching critically low levels, the company wanted a product that allowed them to use Exchange email retention and deletion rules, to manage the size of the Information store and to access all email. To achieve this, Aegisoft installed GFI MailArchiver, an email management and archiving product for Exchange.
 

Since 1994, Aegisoft has been developing powerful, sophisticated and easy to use trading software and services for clients in an industry that depends on quality and reliability. Boasting some of the biggest names in the financial services industry, this New York-based outfit has a high dependency on email and it is its main channel of communication with over 90% of the bulge-bracket broker dealers in the U.S.

The growth of email volumes over the past few years and the storage limitations on Microsoft Exchange Server became a growing concern for the company. As Aaron Laskowski, senior systems engineer at Aegisoft explained, the diminishing availability of storage on their email server was something that could not be ignored.

“The available direct attached storage capacity on Exchange 2003 Server was becoming critically low and this was primarily due to users with excessively large mailboxes and poor discipline to delete unneeded email,” Mr. Laskowski said.

At the same time, backup cycle timeframes were also being adversely affected as they were dumping full information stores to tape nightly. The backup of the Exchange server was also longer than the rest of the servers combined.

He explained that it was not the first time that the company tried to address this issue either.

“Less forceful solutions had been attempted in the past, such as simple tactics like having senior managers issue a directive to delete older email to more aggressive approaches, such as email retention and deletion policies. Requests to users to delete their own email met with limited success mainly due to the large percentage of users that would simply ignore the request. Email retention and deletion policies on their own met with failure because of scenarios where older but business critical emails were also deleted – this approach, thus, had to be abandoned.”
 

As email was rapidly becoming a mission critical application for Aegisoft, they decided that a complete overhaul of their Exchange environment was necessary.

“We decided to migrate to a multi server exchange 2007 environment with the mailbox servers clustered on a SAN for increased storage capacity. We also introduced GFI MailArchiver to archive all incoming and outgoing email to a secondary SQL server also on the SAN,” Mr. Laskowski said.

He added that this gave them immediate capacity to turn on aggressive Exchange email retention and deletion rules, thus keeping the size of the Exchange Information Store to a manageable size and, by extension, daily backups to a much shorter timeframe, while simultaneously ensuring that all email is accessible from the GFI system if access to it is needed for any reason at all.

After choosing GFI MailArchiver, getting the software up and running was a breeze. Mr. Laskowski said: “Installation was extremely simple which primarily consisted of pointing it to an appropriate SQL database, Exchange mailbox store, and Exchange journal account and you’re good to go. An option after install that we elected to pursue was to import all existing email from users’ mailboxes into the GFI MailArchiver system.”
 

Within a few hours of installation, all the company’s emails were successfully archived to the GFI MailArchiver system, immediately reducing the impact on the Exchange server.

According to Mr. Laskowski, Aegisoft realized a number of benefits on three levels. First, from a compliance and management perspective, the company now has full access to users’ incoming and outgoing email history regardless of a user’s attempt to mask their email history. “This has become increasingly important to us as a result of working closely with the financial industry. While not bound by the same SEC regulations as our financial based customers, we aspire to hold ourselves to the same level of security.”

From a technology perspective, Aegisoft were able to deploy a turnkey solution that was basically deploy, configure, and forget. “As a result, we were able to successfully reduce the size of our exchange information stores a significant amount to a manageable size as well as reduce the backup cycle time window for the exchange server.

Finally from a financial perspective, the gains are measured in reduced email down-time that was achieved as well as reduced time invested in monitoring and maintaining the mail system. “The time taken to restore a single or several emails for a user was also reduced from having to restore the whole information store to the mere seconds it takes to click a few buttons in the MailArchiver interface.”
 

GFI MailArchiver provided all the functionality they required to archive all incoming and outgoing mail while keeping their Exchange Information Store file sizes to a manageable level. Although the company had tried another two solutions – Symantec Enterprise Vault and CA Assentor – Mr. Laskowski said: “GFI gave us the feature set that we were looking for at the greatest value by far. It is a cost-effective solution and it has saved us operational time.”
 

For more information about GFI MailArchiver visit: http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/.
 

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

May 2008