The Sak eliminates email downtime

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A leading retailer of handbags and accessories is tackling its business critical email communications with tools to monitor and stabilise its Exchange environment.

Sales, design, product development, manufacturing, inventory and shipping divisions at retailer The Sak depend on the company's email environment to conduct business in 22 international markets.

Brad Bolton, IT director for THE SAK exclusively told IT PRO: "Email has become increasingly critical to the business over the last couple of years. We get a lot of orders from wholesalers and department stores, not to mention the sales and contacts through the e-commerce business."

He said the need to minimise email downtime became apparent when the company's Microsoft Exchange email server suffered eight hours of disruption due to a processor failure. "That's when we realised we can't be without email for a whole working day - we might miss orders, confirmations, queries - and that affects the business," he added.

Bolton said he became aware of an application toolset to monitor application server availability and provide failover functionality when investigating the possibility of buying new standby hardware to address the issue.

To keep its critical email communications with designers, suppliers and vendors up and running, The Sak chose Neverfail Scope, a pre-installation tool that identifies server issues and ensures a stable server environment for high availability implementations. After running Scope, The Sak installed the Neverfail for Exchange module to eliminate email outages and system downtime.

"Running Neverfail, I was able to use existing hardware, which basically halved the possible cost of any solution," said Bolton. "And the monitoring capability guards against hardware failure, while the disaster recovery module even allows us to do primary system maintenance without disrupting the email flow."

Neverfail for Exchange monitors the health of an organisation's server environment including hardware, network infrastructure, operation system and supported applications, fixing the issue or issuing alerts and switching to a redundant backup site to remove the need for users to reboot their email applications.

Bolton added: "As an organisation 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."

He also said the Neverfail capability would be key to the company's future plans to adopting Microsoft Sharepoint and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technologies next year to further improve communication, collaboration and version control. "Basically, I don't have to worry about the Exchange server anymore, freeing me up to think about more strategic things," he said.

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