Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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Surprises
Only a few things caught Tiseo by surprise, and some of those couldn't have been predicted. The importance of e-mail in litigation, for example, wasn't on the radar screen of many companies in 2003 when the Hyperion migration began. "We didn't expect e-discovery," he says, but the company is now putting in a process for filtering and searching e-mail messages. At the same time, Tiseo's messaging team has left the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) controls to IT. "We don't have many SOX controls around Exchange," he adds.
The amount of data that must be archived and stored also surprised the team. "Our storage is growing at 80% a year. That tells me we need to address retention policies. We also need an architecture to restore messages fast; time to restore takes forever," says Tiseo. Hyperion is considering a second tier of storage, which it can use to facilitate e-mail archiving and e-discovery.
The migration to Exchange was essentially complete (except for new acquisitions) by December 2004. A year later, the firm embarked on the second part of the effort, messaging collaboration. In 2006, Hyperion began the deployment of Microsoft SharePoint.
The cost of the migration, from September 2003 through December 2004, was $1.2 million. Although Tiseo hasn't done a formal ROI, on the surface it appears to be money well spent. "It costs much more to manage multiple environments and coexistence than the Exchange platform. We've gone from 40 Notes servers
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to eight Exchange servers with high availability," he says.
The company has virtually eliminated spam, and has established a platform for Windows mobile access and enterprise-wide collaboration. Finally, the messaging team can now promise management that in any future acquisition, "we can give as many as 100 acquired employees their new Hyperion e-mail address on day one," says Tiseo. For a company driven by an acquisition strategy, that may be the biggest payback of all.
This was first published in October 2006
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