Ultra Electronics Customer Story

Ultra Electronics (Ultra) Precision Air and Land Systems are a provision leader in aerospace and electronic equipment. Due to the highly regulated nature of their industry, they needed to purchase an email archive solution which stored all email and made finding it simple.

Ultra purchased Cryoserver in March 2016, and have been a satisfied customer since. We spoke to Martin Vogwell, the IT infrastructure manager.

Email Archiving Requirements

As with many of our customers it took a specific incident which cost Ultra time and money before they went looking for an email archiving solution and found Cryoserver. “A user had left and we had to restore their mailbox to retrieve an email. It was extremely time consuming for us. This was partly due to being unable to keep track of the huge number of emails; but also a requirement for 30GB+ mailboxes which was
causing issues on the mail server. Even though it says it can cope with that volume, Exchange couldn’t.”

Problems & Solutions

1. Slow migrations to new versions of Exchange

Migrations can be time consuming, cost your business money and also put your IT infrastructure at risk. Previously Martin had found Exchange upgrades could be a lengthy process. “The Exchange 2003 to 2007 upgrade took us 3 weeks without Cryoserver.”

“Because of Cryoserver we were able to do a much speedier upgrade to a later version of Exchange. We were able to remove mailbox items older than five years from the primary mailbox which got the migrations done in five days over a huge number of mailboxes.“ Less data meant a more secure migration, less impact for end users who could still access email throughout and fewer headaches for IT.

2. A need to comply with storage rules

Due to strict legislation, Ultra must keep data for as long as some of their products are in use. This data meant they needed to purchase servers with enough storage for the foreseeable future, as well as manage the transfer of that data through processes like upgrades, so economic email storage was critical. “We wanted to search over our entire estate for specific key information. Our needs have been partly about retention of all emails and partly about speeding up the retrieval of information from users’ mailboxes.”

“Because we work in the aerospace industry we have a strict requirement to keep data for the lifetime of a platform. Information is stored within an email that needs to be retrieved, like customer communications. It’s therefore important you are able to search for very specific terms over a large period of time and multiple users, accurately.”

Cryoserver journals email directly from the mail flow, which guarantees an identical copy of every email, sent or received can be stored in one central location. Not only that, but the Cryoserver solution stores that data more economically, as Martin found… “In terms of purchasing new hardware we’ve saved money because we don’t need such large hard drives anymore with Cryoserver.”

3. A need to search through historical data

Once Ultra have stored their email, they need to access it quickly and at a granular level. They had to do this both at an admin and a user level. “Previously it was difficult or impossible to drill down to specific mailboxes and retrieve data without Cryoserver. For users searching for items it was a drag because Outlook is so slow compared to Cryoserver.” “We’ve had instances before where we’ve needed to look for extremely specific key word searches which just wouldn’t have been possible with Outlook or Exchange.”

“We’ve been able to get so granular by using the advanced features within Cryoserver’s search that we get back the data we need extremely quickly. Finding data that would have taken all day to retrieve before now only takes minutes.”

“In terms of searching it’s saved hours of people’s time!”