Customer suCCess

Cetnaj reclaiming 43 Hours a Week for an It staff of three with symantec and sureBridge It solutions

Cetnaj, an electrical products supplier in Australia and New Zealand, grew by leaps and bounds over the past two decades. Meanwhile, its IT staff size remained constant at three people. On the recommendation of SureBridge IT, this lean team implemented Symantec data protection and email archiving solutions. As a result, the team has been able to reduce the time spent on email support by 86 percent, avoid an extensive re-architecture of the exchange system and addition of Tier 1 disk on Tier 1 storage, eliminate size quotas for user mailboxes, and achieve reliable data protection.

managing It in an evolving enterprise

In 1990, customers were beginning to press Cetnaj, a successful wholesaler for electrical contrac-tors in New South Wales, Australia, to evolve. “A lot of our customers were telling us that their customers wanted them to provide lighting fixtures,” explains Tony Cuffe, the organization’s op-erations manager. “We provided some lighting at the time, but not a huge range. So we increased our product line.”

Then electricians expressed interest in having their builder and homeowner customers select fix-tures themselves. “Over the course of three or four years, we transitioned from dealing exclu-sively with electrical contractors to dealing with builders, then homeowner builders, and then the general public,” explains Cuffe.

Electrical contractors still account for about 80 percent of the company’s sales, buying products such as cable, conduit, and meter boxes. But today the electricians enter Cetnaj branches from the rear door. Viewed from the front, the branches look like retail lighting stores.

This evolution fueled a rapid business expansion. Cetnaj grew from a chain of 7 stores in 1990 to encompass 35 stores in Australia, 3 stores in New Zealand, and 3 branches that specialize in data communications. Through this growth, Cuffe and his team of two have been challenged with keep-ing the company’s technology infrastructure viable while living within a tight budget. For help, they’ve turned to SureBridge IT, a Symantec partner.

“For 12 years, we’ve been using SureBridge IT services whenever an issue arises that we can’t handle internally,” Cuffe says. “This relationship allows us to react to the marketplace very, very quickly.”

orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe

Website: www.cetnaj.com.au

Industry: Retail & Distribution

Headquarters: Australia

employees: 250

symANteC soLutIoNs

Archiving

Data Protection

Why symantec?

· Offers reliable data protection

· Archives older emails to less-expensive storage medium

· Simplifies retrieval of archived messages for end users

· Reduces disk space consumption with deduplication

Customer suCCess CetNAj

Data protection shores up agile infrastructure

With the help of SureBridge, Cetnaj moved away from hosting applications and storage on desktop computers. Most of its endpoint machines are now thin clients. The company uses Citrix to stream all desktop functions, including Web browsing, to its various loca-tions. Subsequently, Cetnaj virtualized all of its servers on HP ProLiant server blades.

“Being virtualized and running thin clients enabled us to eliminate a lot of user problems we were having in the field,” Cuffe says. “Plus, as our workforce grew substantially and we added many more stores, we were able to maintain our IT staffing level of three people.”

After rolling out this efficient infrastructure, the Cetnaj team knew it needed to strengthen data protection. “We didn’t have any proper backup running,” Cuffe says. “We would do volume copies once a month, but that was it.” The possibility that the company could lose Microsoft Exchange data or profiles for Citrix Present Server 4.5 thin client users became a major concern. “We could rebuild a user’s profile, but we couldn’t restore it,” Cuffe adds.

To establish a data protection solution, Cet naj implemented Symantec Backup Exec™. Now the company runs nightly backups, both to tapes and to a network-attached Hitachi SAN, NETGEAR storage (NAS) device and IBM tape library. Three years after implementation, Cuffe is pleased with this solution.

“Now our backup success rate is 95%, and when we have had to restore profiles for us-ers who clobbered their systems, Backup Exec has performed 100%,” he reports. “Backup Exec does everything it claims to do, and it does it well. The first time I ever used Backup Exec, it was like jumping out of a car into the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet. There was so much there. But once you get past that, it just reliably works.”

Vaulting past email issues with new archiving solution

After getting data protection under control, Cetnaj faced one more crucial IT challenge: management of its Microsoft Exchange environment. Tier 1 storage for the Exchange server was a Hitachi Fibre Channel 2x AMS500 array solution which made adding disk space complex and expensive. Cuffe tried limiting user mailboxes to two gigabytes each, but some users had difficulty complying.

“Our need for disk space kept growing, and it seemed like we had a tremendous amount of money tied up in Tier 1 storage,” Cuffe says. Worse, the small IT staff was spending the

soLutIoNs At A GLANCe

Key Challenges

• Support company growth without adding IT staff

• Store expanding email archive without buying new Tier 1 storage

• Enable end users to access old emails

• Back up data on a daily basis

symantec Products

• Symantec Backup Exec™

– Backup Exec Agent for Enterprise Vault

– Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft Ex-change

• Symantec Enterprise Vault™

– Enterprise Vault for Mail and File System Archiving

symantec Partner

• SureBridge IT (surebridge.com.au)

technology environment

• Server platform: HP ProLiant server blades for VMware Virtualization

• VMware ESX Operating System

• Applications: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and 2003, Citrix Present Server 4.5

• Storage: Hitachi, NETGEAR NAS

• IBM Tape Library

BusINess resuLts AND teCHNICAL BeNeFIts

email Archiving

• 86% less IT staff time spent on email support (7 hours/week vs. 50 hours/week)

• Eliminated quotas restricting mailbox size

• 30% faster backups (3.5 hours/day vs. 5 hours/day)

Data Protection

• Backups nightly, rather than monthly

• 95% backup success rate

• 100% recovery success rate

“The compression and deduplication

within Symantec Enterprise Vault

are having a major effect on the

disk space we require for email

storage. We no longer have to limit

the size of user mailboxes.”

tony Cuffe

Operations Manager

Cetnaj

Customer suCCess CetNAj

majority of its support time—50 hours per week—dealing with end users’ email issues. “Some users were constantly getting alerts that their mailbox was full,” Cuffe says. “They didn’t understand that messages in their ‘deleted’ folder were still taking up space in their mailbox. On a daily basis, IT was spend-ing time helping users figure out how to keep mailboxes under the two gigabyte limit.”

Cetnaj turned to its longtime partner SureBridge for assistance. “I was in a posi-tion where I needed to either spend a lot of money increasing our Tier 1 storage or come up with an alternative,” Cuffe says. “With the help of SureBridge, we have been able to save thousands in cost avoidance.”

The solution SureBridge proposed was Symantec Enterprise Vault™, which enables users to store, manage, and discover un-structured information—such as emails—across the enterprise. “We understand Cetnaj’s challenges and have enough experi-ence with various archiving systems to know what works and what doesn’t work,” says Val Chistiakoff, solutions specialist at SureBridge Solution Specialist. “In our expe-rience, Enterprise Vault is the only solution that is rock-solid, so it is the solution we recommended.”

email support demands 86 percent less It time

The Hitachi storage device still holds Exchange data, but the volume is capped at one gigabyte per mailbox. When a mailbox exceeds that size, messages are moved to Enterprise Vault. A NETGEAR NAS device, which uses low-cost serial ATA drives, stores the Enterprise Vault archives.

Because Enterprise Vault stores just one copy of each file or message, regardless of the number of times it occurs, the NAS drives’ four terabytes of space are proving to be more than adequate. “The low-cost storage is filling up very slowly,” Cuffe reports, “so obviously the compression and deduplication

within Symantec Enterprise Vault are having a major effect on the disk space we require for email storage. We no longer have to limit the size of user mailboxes.”

Enterprise Vault is also having a major effect on IT productivity saving many hours per week. Cetnaj end users can search and ac-cess archived emails, regardless of the age of the message. And the full text of attach-ments—not just the messages themselves—is indexed.

“We wanted users to be able to look after themselves, rather than putting a call through to operations every time they need to drag up an old email,” Cuffe says. “In a lot of cases, employees need old emails with information about contracts or employment records. They simply want to pull the message up on the screen and print it, then they’ll never need it again. They can do that easily with Enterprise Vault; it runs seamlessly in the background, which is a great relief.”

The new flexibility has cut the amount of time IT staff spend on email-related support from 50 hours a week down to 7—a reduction of 86 percent. Plus, the company’s nightly Exchange server backups are much faster. Before Enterprise Vault, the backup window was five hours. Now that mailboxes are lim-ited to one gigabyte, backups take 3.5 hours.

the ultimate benefit: Peace of mind

Although not currently required by Australian law, maintaining archived copies of old emails is prudent from a legal perspective. Cuffe believes that Enterprise Vault has also cut down on employees’ use of email for non-productive purposes. “We’ve been fairly transparent with Enterprise Vault in our workforce,” he says. “Employees know that all their emails are fully recorded and stored forever. In every company, some employees utilize the company email system in ways they shouldn’t. I think we’ve cut that back a fair bit with Enterprise Vault.”

Cuffe is confident that Symantec solutions—and SureBridge services—will serve Cetnaj well as the future unfolds. “We’ve reached a point,” he says, “where there’s no additional technology that we feel we need to have right now. The combination of Enterprise Vault and Backup Exec is providing us with peace of mind.”

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Backup Exec, and Enterprise Vault are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

“We have enough experience with

various archiving systems to know

what works and what doesn’t work.

In our experience, Enterprise Vault is

the only solution that is rock-solid, so

it is the solution we recommended.”

Val Chistiakoff

Solutions Specialist

SureBridge IT

“For 12 years, we’ve been

using SureBridge IT services

whenever an issue arises that

we can’t handle internally. This

relationship allows us to react to the

marketplace very, very quickly.”

tony Cuffe

Operations Manager

Cetnaj