Making The Case: Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches
Delivering Continuous Availability Ensures Business Critical Communication
THE SAK creates a wide range of incomparable textiles including leather, suede, canvas, straw, rattan, and wood bead. The company has evolved from a handbag business, to an accessories, lifestyle brand.
The Challenge
As a global textile manufacturer, THE SAK is heavily dependent upon email to conduct business among its geographically dispersed divisions. Email supports a wide-range of the company's functions including fulfilling orders, purchasing the latest materials, sharing new sketches among designers, updating inventory and shipping the latest handbags. After enduring a server failure that led to an eight-hour outage coupled with an unstable Exchange environment, which regularly experienced outages, the company's COO demanded a solution.
"As an organization operating across several continents and multiple time zones, the ability of our employees to access the information they need to do their jobs is paramount to continued growth," says Brad Bolton, IT director for THE SAK. "THE SAK required a solution that would help our organization take proactive measures to ensure continuous availability, enabled the company to utilize existing hardware investments and would be easy to use and maintain."
Working with a Neverfail partner and value-added reseller, Bolton was looking for a solution that would allow employees to remain seamlessly connected to the Exchange email environment. Due to the company's size, Bolton did not believe having the servers clustered geographically was necessary, nor worth the extra expense. The company has 80 employees based in New York and San Francisco, as well as factories located in China and Indonesia.
The Solution
"You feel it when email isn't there," states Bolton. "Incoming email is run through our main server in San Francisco and is our primary communications vehicle. Neverfail sold itself. It was a perfect fit because I didn't have to buy a new piece of hardware to use it." With Neverfail's unique cloning process, there is no need for identical hardware. Replication of the entire server environment occurs seamlessly from the primary to the secondary server. This prevents the need to spend hours trying to configure the secondary server to match exactly to the primary server, which is required by most other continuous availability solutions. Neverfail for Microsoft Exchange proactively monitors the entire Exchange mail server environment, including server hardware, the network infrastructure, operating systems and the Microsoft Exchange application.
Prior to the installation, Bolton made use of Neverfail SCOPE (Server Check Optimization and Performance Evaluation) to ensure that his server environment was in shape to install Neverfail's high availability solution. "SCOPE was extremely important to us," notes Bolton. "Neverfail is the only company with a pre-installation tool that reminds you what is on your server and alerts you to problems that could affect installation." Bolton is looking forward to having SCOPE running continuously in his environment to alert him to any issues before they become problems. "By following Neverfail's documentation, installation was easily accomplished," continues Bolton.
The Results
Neverfail for Exchange now monitors the health of THE SAK's entire email server environment including hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and supported applications. If a planned or unplanned issue arises, THE SAK relies on Neverfail to take corrective actions to fix the issue or initiate a system failover to their secondary environment. If a failover is necessary, Bolton knows that his users will remain continuously connected to email with no need to restart any application. THE SAK conducts routine tests of the Neverfail solution and has found that it performs better than expected. "Neverfail for Exchange is the most comprehensive email availability product on the market," believes Bolton. "It has exceeded the strict requirements our organization set forth during product evaluations." TMP
With Neverfail's unique cloning process, there is no need for identical hardware. Replication of the entire server environment occurs seamlessly from the primary to the secondary server. This prevents the need to spend hours trying to configure the secondary server to match exactly to the primary server, which is required by most other continuous availability solutions.