Customer Stories

posted on 20 June 2008 05:27

Loyens & Loeff is an independent Benelux-based full-service law firm with integrated corporate law and tax practices. It has over 850 lawyers working across seven offices in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and eleven offices in the world's major financial centers. With over 1,500 employees worldwide, Loyens & Loeff provides legal and tax services to large and medium-sized corporates, banks and other financial institutions, operating internationally.

Loyens & Loeff exchanges thousands of emails each day with their customers and colleagues around the world. Email is used to communicate important legal and procedural information and the distribution of content to specific individuals inside and outside the company must be carefully tracked.

The firm accumulates between 4GB and 5GB (Gigabytes) of email and associated attachments each day and this volume is doubling every year. Some of the largest inboxes can generate more than 60,000 emails a year. While best practice dictate that these records should be archived for seven years, the current corporate retention policies at Loyens & Loeff exceed this. Given their existing volume and projected growth rates, Loyens & Loeff estimates that their email archive could grow to as much as 40TB (Terabytes) over the next five years.

Loyens & Loeff have been using a Microsoft Exchange email environment for many years and later installed Symantec Enterprise Vault (EV) to help manage their email archive volume. Although this environment was operational, it was not fully optimised and emails were being archived on EMC Clariion primary storage or Centera hardware. This architecture was very expensive and required backup, creating a significant cost and resource burden for IT services.

It decided it wanted to optimise its Symantec EV environment to better archive email from Exchange servers located on the primary site in Amsterdam and provide a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy at their facility in Rotterdam. It required a more cost-effective email archive solution than EMC Clariion and Centera. In addition, the archive media life needed to be greater than magnetic disk to reduce the frequency of hardware replacement and stable enough to eliminate the need for daily backups.

Local integrator 2E2 Data Management recommended the use of Plasmon's UDO Archive Appliance for long-term email.

After some consideration, Loyens & Loeff purchased two Plasmon UDO Archive Appliances, selecting the 38TB, AA638, which will enable it to meet its five year email capacity target without significant additional capital investment.

Kees Sprangers, Senior System Engineer at Loyens & Loeff, said: "We calculated that installing a Plasmon archive could save us more than 280,000 euros over the next five years when compared to our current EMC storage. This saving is achieved through lower purchase and operating costs and since the Archive Appliance uses very stable UDO media it also eliminates the need for archive backup. This saves us money (and) also reduces our backup window and IT resource."

Sprangers said: "We did not replace EMC Clariion and Centera with Plasmon; We use the Plasmon appliance to consolidate the storage space for e-mail archiving only for the coming years, not for other storage applications. EMC storage is still playing a main role within our company."

The Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance has been fully certified by Symantec with its Enterprise Vault software. Using a standard file system interface, it appears as a normal share making for a simple configuration with EV. Loyens & Loeff developed a policy-driven staging strategy that moves emails from local inboxes after three months and stores them within EV. After an additional nine months all email is transferred to the Archive Appliance for long-term retention. This process is totally automated and transparent to the end user. They have full access to all their old emails through a standard Exchange interface.

This allows Loyens & Loeff to offload infrequently-accessed email from expensive primary storage while providing full and transparent access to emails of all ages. In addition, Loyens & Loeff decided to deploy Plasmon's UDO Compliant Write Once media
which provides excellent authenticity since email cannot be altered once written, but also allows Loyens & Loeff to physically destroy emails at end-of-life as part of their corporate risk management policies.

For extra protection emails archived on the AA638 in Amsterdam are replicated each evening to a second AA638 at the Loyens & Loeff DR site in Rotterdam. Archive backup is eliminated through the combination of stable UDO recording technology and a second copy of all emails at their DR facility. The longevity of the UDO media and Plasmon's long-term product support philosophy means that Loyens & Loeff can operate their Archive Appliance for much longer than standard disk storage systems, lowering total cost of ownership and minimising risk.

Loyens & Loeff has also identified additional environmental benefits to the deployment of their
two AA638s. The UDO Archive Appliance consumes substantially less power than an equivalent magnetic disk archive.

Kees Sprangers said: "We calculated that our two AA638s will cut our power costs by 60,000 euros over five years of operation. This improves our bottom line and helps the environment."

Loyens & Loeff is planning to expand the archive to include unstructured data from its content
management system and as regulatory oversight grows they may need to meet new compliance obligations. With these additions, their archive capacity will also increase so the scalability of their architecture is another critical consideration.

^{[B&F staff.]}