Meeting the Needs of the Most Demanding Email Environments

Email systems have quickly become a critical lifeline for today's business. According to the Radicati Group, there were 1.4 billion email users in 2009, stretching email systems to process as much as 247 billion messages per day. This puts new burdens on IT groups tasked with managing critical email infrastructures. Email service providers must ensure high email availability and different levels of service, even in the face of frequently unpredictable spikes in demand. Likewise, large enterprises have turned to email consolidation as a way to contain costs and centralize email management.

Storage issues often take center stage, as systems strain to handle large volumes of simultaneous users and equally large directory structures. How well the storage performs under pressure often means the difference between easy email management and long hours spent reconfiguring systems.

Setting the Bar for Email Performance, Scalability and Availability

Capable of processing millions of simultaneous users and tens of thousands of email messages per minute, BlueArc has built a reputation for shattering independent email speed records - even when handling up to 2.5 million simultaneous users.

Accommodating large directory structures with ease, one integrated, multi tiered BlueArc Storage Server can house up to 126 separate file systems, or a single file system scalable up to 256TB.

With support for over 16 million files per directory, BlueArc storage sets a new performance bar for today's robust email environments. Thanks to BlueArc's hardware-accelerated architecture and hardware-based file system, BlueArc can quickly process both very large files and large volumes of small files.

When no disruption in email service can be tolerated, BlueArc also delivers peace of mind through its high availability. Protecting data from even catastrophic site failure, BlueArc storage supports no single point of failure, and includes data path protection with NVRAM, parallel RAID striping, clustering and block or file-level replication.

Supporting Quick Email Management and Low TCO

BlueArc Storage Servers incorporate a shared, Virtual Storage Pool that makes quick work of expanding storage capacity to accommodate email growth. Now, administrators can set up multiple Virtual Volumes of storage, each with its own capacity threshold and policy-based data management.

Capacity can be added or reduced in seconds to support the changing needs of key email groups or different classes of email service available. BlueArc storage also ensures optimal storage utilization, allowing administrators to develop rule-based policies for managing data via quotas, thin provisioning and even automatically migrating data to lower-cost tiers on the same Storage Server.

Supporting both block- and file-based email from within the same system, BlueArc eliminates the need for multiple systems and multiple storage architectures. Role-based administration also allows less experienced staff to perform common administration tasks, while protecting access to higher level tasks.

Protecting email Integrity and Authenticity

As wireless networks flourish, email systems must remain ever-vigilant to protect message data from the threat of virus attack, security breaches or inadvertent deletion or corruption. Incorporating built-in support for standard antivirus applications, BlueArc allows antivirus scanning to run in the background on the storage network - with no impact to client performance.

BlueArc systems naturally support common Ethernet security features, such as access control lists as well as integration into RADIUS and LDAP environments. They are also built with high levels of security to restrict access to files, directories or volumes. BlueArc can even offer file systems with write-once, read-many (WORM) functionality that meet the strictest compliance requirements by preventing files from being changed until a predefined retention date passes.

When Getting It Right Matters Most

The right storage solution can prevent IT teams from working overtime as they struggle to tune or grow systems and solve common email performance issues that accompany rapid email growth.

BlueArc is a proven industry leader able to scale and perform even under the most demanding email workloads. When critical email systems are at stake, companies have come to depend on BlueArc storage for its high availability, performance and ease of provisioning.