Consumer packaging giant Rexam is to consolidate its email systems to save £3m in storage costs over five years.

The company says better use of email will also allow it to improve disaster recovery capabilities.

‘The main driver was the cost to the business of managing the environment,’ said Antonio Traetto, global messaging manager at Rexam.

‘Our email runs on standalone servers, which means we have more than 100 to back-up.

‘This has an impact on our disaster recovery capabilities as well as the cost of managing that many servers in many locations, where we rely on local support.’

The current environment, which uses direct attached storage, does not support contingency plans to restore access to email in the event of downtime.

The messaging team will standardise the global Rexam Microsoft Exchange email environment over the next two years on a storage area network (San) comprising six Clariion CX700 servers from vendor EMC.

‘We are consolidating each geographical zone to enable a disaster recovery plan that will replicate email data between these locations. This will not be in real time, but will ensure no data is lost,’ said Traetto.

‘The environment has lots of single points of failure at the moment – we will be building in some resilience, reducing downtime and saving money on replacement technology.’

Traetto says when this work is complete, Rexam will look at extending the environment to cover archiving. ‘Whatever we decide to do about archiving, by 2008/9 we expect to have full payback on the project,’ he said.

Jon Collins, principal infrastructure and management analyst for researcher Quocirca, says that other companies should look to copy Rexam’s disaster recovery principles in their consolidation plans.