Becker & Poliakoff Purges Volumes of Data from its Exchange Data Store after Implementing Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition

The Company

Becker & Poliakoff is a diverse commercial law firm with more than 145 attorneys and lobbyists practicing in 13 offices throughout Florida, New York City, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Prague, Czech Republic. The Firm is a member of Legus, a national and global network of law firms that enable their attorneys to provide assistance to clients nationally and worldwide. Founded in Miami-Dade in 1973, the Firm provides its clients with legal services in seven primary areas of law including: real estate; business litigation; customs and international trade; government law and lobbying; corporate and securities law; construction; condominium and homeowners’ association law, plus other areas such as offshore asset protection, tax, and estate planning; technology and telecommunications; intellectual property; collections and foreclosure; gaming, bankruptcy and financial restructuring; and more.

The Challenge

In the legal field, there is likely no application more critical than email. This is especially true when, like Becker & Poliakoff, you have over 350 employees in 13 different offices. Email is the communication lifeline that connects offices with each other and lawyers with their clients. Yet, their email retention policy was beginning to take a significant toll on the firm’s technology infrastructure. The company’s email information store for its Exchange 2003 system was over 2TB in size – something comparable to law firms more than four times their size.

“Our average mailbox size was 9.6GB,” said Avi Solomon, Director of Information Technology at Becker & Poliakoff. “We even had one that was 45GB and 12 others that were over 15GB. We needed to implement an archiving solution to improve our overall email storage management and performance challenges before we migrated to Exchange 2010.”

Key to Becker & Poliakoff’s email archiving solution selection were factors including ease of use and manageability. The solution needed to allow for the view of messages directly in Outlook and the ability to work with messages through a simple drag-and-drop fashion. The firm also wanted folder replication, mailbox and folder proxy capabilities and the ability to support web-based management.

The Solution

With its selection criteria in mind, Becker & Poliakoff began the solution evaluation. Ultimately, the director looked at seven separate solutions but found that only one stood out from the crowd.

“Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition was the only product to meet all of our requirements,” said Solomon. “It was easy to use and full-featured. We implemented a proof of concept program with Metalogix and were even more impressed.”

Becker & Poliakoff has set up their archive solution on a SAN using lower cost, higher capacity SATA disks. Initially, the firm deployed the solution for its top 100 email users. After seeing the benefits of the massive reduction of email in the Exchange environment, and the benefits to system performance, the Firm purchased enough licenses to archive every mailbox. With only 140 mailboxes archived to date, the firm has seen a reduction of 45% of its email repository for those users, totaling almost 800GB of email data.

“We have been able to eliminate over 5 million emails from our email data store, just with our initial 140 users, and we achieved that in just two and a half weeks,” said Solomon. “We are about to purge a few million more emails shortly. Finally we are reducing our Exchange footprint, increasing our system performance and utilizing lower cost storage to do it.”

With Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition in place, the law firm has implemented its new email retention policy. It archives everything and then purges from Outlook anything that is older than six months including mail items and attachments. Once the purge is complete, Becker & Poliakoff will focus on reorganizing the data in its email environment, and defragmenting the databases for even better performance and better management of their high performance, high-cost, fibre channel disks used for the live Exchange environment.

The Results

With Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition now in place, Becker & Poliakoff has a scalable, reliable email archive to preserve all of their valued email data, without impacting Exchange server performance or creating storage bloat. Users are able to continue to access their archived data with a simple click of the mouse, while retention policies are automated and simple to manage for the law firm’s IT staff. With its email data now under control, the migration to Exchange 2010 will be a much faster project for everyone throughout the organization.

“Metalogix Archive Manager is one of those products I don’t have a lot to talk about because it simply does its job,” said Solomon. “The product and the Metalogix team have been exceptional. I know we made the right choice.”