Like many businesses today, CharterMac, a leading real estate financial services company based in New York City, relies heavily on email for internal communications and to correspond with customers. Amar Persaud, vice president of IT operations at CharterMac, says, "Email has become as necessary as the telephone for us. We do a huge number of transactions worth millions of dollars and we couldn't survive without it."
The necessity of uninterrupted email service was underscored for CharterMac when the company recently relocated. The move meant that the company would be without email for a few hours. However, senior management recognized that even such a brief suspension of service was unacceptable because the company conducts business 24/7.
CharterMac immediately began investigating ways to ensure continuous email service over a WAN for their offices in Manhattan and New Jersey—regardless of business or technical circumstances. CharterMac executives wanted assurance that they would have continuous access to applications as well as complete site protection in case of a disaster.
Finding the Right Solution
While seeking the right solution for their organization, the CharterMac IT team looked at a number of different options, including products from Computer Associates and NSI Software. "Those products had one thing in common," Persaud says. "Email was interrupted when you switched to and then back from your backup server. Our users would have to restart Outlook or even reboot their system. We couldn't accept that."
After some searching, the CharterMac team turned to Neverfail. They were pleased to find that the Neverfail solution required no interruption for the user. "Neverfail was clearly superior in the fail-back process," says Persaud. "With Neverfail, there is nothing you have to do to transfer application availability to the secondary server and back to the primary server."
Persaud has also been impressed with the Neverfail Server Check Optimization and Performance Evaluation (SCOPE) product, which uses advanced, automated tools to provide detailed information about the current state of the server environment. SCOPE is designed to help organizations establish an optimum platform for long-term reliability, which is vital in providing true high availability.
The Solution
Once CharterMac chose Neverfail for Exchange to provide the high availability and disaster recovery the company needed for its vital email systems, the first step in implementation was to make a fast, accurate analysis of the environment using Neverfail SCOPE. "SCOPE ran for 24 hours and determined what our real physical requirements were," Persaud says. "Based on this analysis, we could be sure that we had the appropriate equipment and the right configurations, and that we had the bandwidth necessary to send data back and forth between our Manhattan and New Jersey offices."
CharterMac also installed the Neverfail Low Bandwidth Module, which significantly reduces transmission times and bandwidth requirements between the active and passive server in both LAN and WAN environments. Because the company uses Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange to guard against email viruses, the IT team also purchased Neverfail's Application Module eXtension for this key auxiliary application, which provides complete protection right out of the box without custom scripting.
The Results
CharterMac now uses Neverfail for Exchange to monitor the health of the company's Exchange servers in both offices, including physical server hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and Microsoft Exchange applications. If the Neverfail solution detects a problem or any performance degradation, it automatically takes several corrective actions to resolve the issue without resorting to a full system failover.
CharterMac executives are pleased with the business continuity and disaster protection ensured by their Neverfail solution—two critically important factors in the fast-paced world of financial services. "Our email volume is growing exponentially, and email is absolutely critical for us," Persaud says. "Neverfail gives us a backup system that fits our requirements."
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