Email Consolidation, Record Retention, Archiving and e-Discovery, and High Availability

Executive Summary

Overview
Symantec Corporation is a global leader in infrastructure software. The company helps customersprotect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security and system availability. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries.

Barriers
Symantec sought an archiving solution to provide a framework for organizing unstructured content for legal holds and records retention purposes. Email was identified as one of the higher risk areas and became the focus of the first phase of the archiving project. The company also wanted to reduce email storage costs and improve end-user access to relevant emails and data.

The Solution
Seeking greater operational efficiency, lower costs, and the ability to benefit from the company’s own technology, Symantec leveraged the expertise of key legal, IT, product, and consulting personnel to establish an internal Corporate Records Retention Program. The program involved defining a global records management policy and retention schedule, deploying Symantec Enterprise Vault software, and enhancing the Enterprise Vault infrastructure. Between December 2005 and December 2007, the following milestones were achieved as part of Phase One: consolidation and clustering of the Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure; deployment of Enterprise Vault, including Microsoft Exchange Archiving, to all 17,500 Symantec employees; and deployment of Microsoft Exchange Journaling to the executive team and the Vault Cache option to the executive team and mobile/remote employees.

Phase Two, which involved the rollout of Discovery Accelerator to the eDiscovery group for use with legal and other internal functions, was completed in June 2008.

Symantec’s relationship with NetApp was instrumental in the project planning and deployment, ensuring that the NetApp storage units and data management and protection components were properly integrated. In addition, the strong, cooperative partnership between Symantec’s core team members was a critical success factor.

Benefits
As a result of the Phase One Enterprise Vault deployment, Symantec is achieving substantial business value. Alchemy Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis and quantified realized and projected business value in the following areas:

• IT Helpdesk Mailbox Support Labor Savings: $72,636 in cost savings by eliminating mailbox quota and corruption issues from August 2007 through December 2009.
• Microsoft Exchange Server Cost and Labor Savings: $2,663,366 in savings associated with server hardware, software, maintenance, and IT labor costs from May 2006 through December 2009.
• Lower Cost Email Storage: $1,799,680 in storage savings with compression and a tiered storage infrastructure from August 2007 through December 2009.
• Green Energy Savings: $89,998 in energy cost avoidance related to server reductions, data compression, and storage tiering from May 2006 through December 2009. By converting kilowatts of electricity avoided to kilograms of carbon emissions from electricity generation, Symantec estimates a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of more than 500,000 kilograms of CO2.1
• Higher Availability Productivity Savings: $3,282,673 in labor productivity savings by consolidating and clustering Microsoft Exchange servers from May 2006 through December 2009.

In addition to the above benefits, Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator deployed to the eDiscovery group provided the capability for Symantec to reduce the cost of outsourced external processing and hosting fees. Discovery Accelerator enables the company to produce smaller, more targeted email data sets that is sent to outside counsel or other e-discovery vendors for litigation cases. Symantec Corporation is a global leader in infrastructure software. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security and system availability. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries.

For more information on Alchemy Group or to download this document, go to http://www.alchemygroupinc.com/category/research/bva/