Wellington College compresses emails on-premise with Barracuda

Storage needs reduced by 80 per cent says IT director

While moving storage to the cloud via off-premise data centres is becoming a popular choice even for operations as small as a school, Wellington College in Berkshire has recently seen results with some good, old-fashioned data-crunching.

Choosing Barracuda Networks' Message Archiver 850, a 4,000-user, RAID 6 physical storage array, the college says it has managed to cut its email and IM storage requirements by 80 per cent.

"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," said Wellington College IT director Tony Whelton.

"It has reduced our storage requirements from the original 6TB of data, to a much more manageable 850GB," said Whelton. "This has reduced our storage needs by over 80 per cent, leaving it free to be used for other purposes which delivers an indirect saving to the general IT budget."

"Stubbing" email attachments, removing duplicates and generally compressing data in an automatic process, Whelton said the solution is almost self-sufficient, adding, "We have hardly had to touch it since it was installed".

The college is also impressed with the solution's ability to preserve message and audit history for the data it archives, allowing close scrutiny of emails and IMs should the need arise.

Whelton describes the overall effect of the Barracuda solution, which has also freed up network capacity and reduced manual archiving duties that used to take up crucial staff time, as "huge".

Wellington is also a user of Barracuda's Spam & Virus Firewall, which Whelton said he "couldn't fault" for malware management.