Saint John Vianney and Sonian -- Real World Solutions

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:10:43 +0000

Several years ago Network Administrator Tom McKenna moved the email system of Saint John Vianney — a private, Catholic institution based in Holmdel, NJ with over 1,000 students — to Gmail, which Google provides for free to schools and universities as part of its Google Apps for Education offering. Since Gmail is a hosted service, Saint John Vianney was spared the expense and hassle of installing and managing a mail server.

While Gmail’s plentiful free storage provision ensured that Saint John Vianney didn’t have to worry about over flowing mailboxes, it did not include a hosted archiving service that would meet the school’s seven-year email retention policy. McKenna’s next step was to find and install an affordable email archiving system that would complement the school’s new Gmail system.

McKenna explored several hosted solutions recommended by Gmail and selected Sonian’s cloud-based email archiving and eDiscovery service largely based on cost. When measured against hosted email and archiving suites, the combination of Gmail and Sonian was still less expensive. “As far as I’m concerned, Saint John Vianney has a best-of-breed solution with the combined Gmail and Sonian services,” says McKenna. “Their SLAs mean they worry about the data by providing capabilities that we could never afford, such as redundancy, multiple data center backups, climate controlled data centers, etc. All at a fair price.”

Optimizing the Cloud to Empower Your Message Archive

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:33:15 +0000

Each of the hundred billion emails, IMs and documents created every day need to be preserved for some period of time. Yet, IT managers — who already struggle to manage overflowing in-boxes and maxed out email servers — are about to be hit with another data explosion.

Enterprises are implementing new collaboration systems (Sharepoint, GDocs, ZoHo) for document sharing, which means employees will have more options beyond email to collaborate internally with each other and externally with customers, vendors, friends and family. These new capabilities create growing “shards of content” or data silos in the enterprise that need to be captured and archived for compliance, eDiscovery, storage management and universal information governance best practices.

The best, most cost-effective and reliable way to deal with this data explosion is to implement a centralized archiving service powered by cloud-scale infrastructure as a service. Here’s why:

Installed archiving software never has enough compute power for large searches or deep analytics. The cloud offers CPU on demand to power through terabytes of content.
Installed archiving software consumes expensive SAN and backup/DR storage. The cloud as a long-term storage locker with integrated search and analytics is configured as a virtual extension of the enterprise network, but it costs less and is just as secure.
Installed archiving software can’t help gain valuable data insights to manage “top-line-growth” issues from better business intelligence and value that can be extracted from all content silos across the organization.

Cloud computing at its core essence offers incredible amounts of compute, storage and bandwidth for low commodity prices. For enterprise IT managers, cloud-powered archiving promises to reduce their storage costs, improve their overall email server performance, meet compliance requirements and deliver a quick, easy and secure end-user experience.

As a result, businesses have a viable choice on where to host and process their data: on-premises in their own data center, in the cloud, or a hybrid IT mixture. Cloud computing can be harnessed in a safe, secure, reliable way to become a virtual extension of an enterprise’s own data center, which allows the IT decision maker to save money and time by leveraging the cloud’s “pay as you go” model for on-demand virtual CPU and hosted storage with 99.999 resiliency. Pricing is typically at the granular level, which means you pay for CPU by the hour and storage & bandwidth by the gigabyte.

Cloud computing concepts are resonating with more and more IT buyers. Small to mid-size organizations are using the cloud for Tier 3 storage and backup. Larger enterprises are considering cloud scale-up and scale-down technologies in their own data centers and will eventually use the hybrid approach to have access to public clouds when a “cloud burst” of compute horsepower is required to process large amounts of data quickly without having to buy 1000 CPU’s or wait weeks to get a query result.

Just as mainframes gave way to mini-computers and mini-computers to the personal computer, cloud compute promises to usher in a new wave of computing that will change the way we work. Moving your email archive to the cloud is a great way to join the cloud computing revolution.

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Greg Arnette is the founder and CTO of Sonian. The trusted cloud-powered universal data management company, Sonian delivers archiving/storage, eDiscovery and compliance services. Sonian’s mission is to archive the world’s electronic communications and files and make them universally accessible and useful via its powered universal data management service, which is secure, reliable and affordable.