Synetix Solutions Ltd cuts Wellington College email storage requirements by over 80%

With over 1,100 students and staff using more than 3,500 mobile devices every day, the exchange of email at Wellington College is enormous. Over the years, it accumulated over six terabytes of email data, which has to be transmitted and stored across the network daily for compliance requirements. The regular transmitting of this huge amount of data was slowing down network performance and the ‘physical’ storage requirements for archiving the data was huge.

Having contacted Synetix Solutions Ltd for advice IT Director, Tony Whelton, opted to trial the Barracuda Message Archiver 850 and took advantage of the free, thirty-day trial offered.

Whelton said: “There was significant time associated with managing the archiving process, so we were desperately in need of a system whereby the high volume of emails could be managed more efficiently, and without disrupting the network performance.”

The Barracuda Networks Message Archiver works by ‘stubbing’ email attachments to reduce email storage (on average) by 85%. It also automatically de-duplicates and compresses emails before archiving takes place. Once configured the appliance simply takes over keeping admin tasks to a minimum.

Commenting on the upgrade Whelton said: “Synextix Solutions Ltd were really helpful and having used Barracuda products previously I had a high degree of confidence that the Barracuda Message Archiver was up to the job. It has reduced our storage requirements from the original six terabytes of data, to a much more manageable 850 gigabytes. This has reduced our storage needs by over 80 percent, leaving it free to be used for other purposes which delivers an indirect saving to the general IT budget.”