Kalmbach Publishing Co. Ensures E-mail Availability with Dell AppAssure Software for Microsoft Exchange

Background

Kalmbach Publishing Co.’s magazines, web sites, and books cover a wide variety of special-interest and leisure subjects. Their goal of being the “leader in each of [their] fields” is greatly dependent on e-mail communication among its departments (sales, marketing, production, editorial and operations). Additionally, e-mail plays a pivotal role in communications with external parties, such as customers and distributors. Kalmbach’s IT team cannot guarantee that critical e-mail messages won’t get deleted or that Exchange won’t experience unplanned outages. Their messaging infrastructure has too many ‘moving parts’. But, by using Dell AppAssure Software (Exchange Server backup) they can recover any missing message – or the entire Exchange environment (in the case of a true disaster) – in minutes.

E-Mail is Mission-Critical

Alan Weiss, Network Engineer at Kalmbach Publishing Co., can remember a time when e-mail was just a nice thing to have. “As recently as eight years ago people used many forms of communication; the phone, regular mail, and faxes were all well-used alternatives,” he says. “Now e-mail is an absolute necessity here. If we had an outage that lasted one minute, the help desk would light up like a Christmas tree. It’s become critical to keep e-mail available and lessen the impact of any problem that might occur along the way.”

In order to do just that, Weiss has turned to Dell AppAssure. The company’s Exchange Server and 300 mailboxes are all protected against a potential catastrophe thanks to Dell AppAssure.

Before using Dell AppAssure, Weiss attempted to use a traditional backup product to restore messages and recover from e-mail problems. After quite a bit of work… it just wasn’t working. So he began to look for a way to resolve e-mail loss and outage problems more efficiently, and with less heartache.

“We saw that Dell AppAssure had a 30-day trial, and it was easy to request, download and install,” Weiss remembers. “In just a week we had it running and were testing it in the lab. We deleted messages on purpose and then recovered them quickly. Dell AppAssure is quite easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of documentation because it’s generally intuitive. It’s so easy I’m able to just figure things out myself.”

No More “All-Nighters”

Since using Dell AppAssure, Weiss hasn’t had to recover from any e-mail disasters. He does remember one pre-Dell AppAssure issue that required him to pull an all-nighter restoring Exchange data that had been corrupted by a hardware failure. “We thought we were fully protected with a RAID server, but we weren’t, and I’ve learned that RAID just doesn’t offer the protection you need when it comes to Exchange,” he says. “We had to deal with database rebuilds. It was an incredible pain.” Weiss quickly learned that backup technology does not provide disaster recovery and moved beyond relying solely on RAID.

Dell AppAssure takes snapshots of every change across Kalmbach’s entire Exchange environment every 15 minutes and checks the EDBs (Exchange databases) for corruption. “Those snapshots are great,” reports Weiss. “It’s actually exciting to see a snapshot displayed with the infamous red ‘X’ depicting a potential problem – it lets me know Dell AppAssure is there for me.”

With Dell AppAssure in place, Weiss knows that recovering from any outage will be fast and that Exchange will be restored with very fresh data. “It’s much better to be back online in minutes with your potential data loss no greater than 15 minutes versus working for 22 hours to do a bare metal restore and have lost 22 hours of data.”

Dell AppAssure Brings “Easy” to Disaster Recovery

“Sometimes it seems like software developers don’t really understand or use their own product,” says Weiss. “You can tell that Dell AppAssure really does know and use Dell AppAssure.”

While Weiss hasn’t had to rely too heavily on Dell AppAssure’s technical support to get Dell AppAssure going or to use the product, he has developed confidence in the engineering and expertise behind the product. “There was one time I couldn’t recover a folder that had been deleted. I called Dell AppAssure technical support and they helped me fx the problem right away. Another time, I mentioned that when I did a once a day back up for of-site storage I encountered some error messages. It turned out that they were a result of my configuration and did not impact the process – just a product of my backup running out of sync with the 15 minute snapshots. Dell AppAssure completely understood what I was talking about and came up with a way to turn of the snapshots for a period of time. They make using Dell AppAssure even easier.”

Now Kalmbach Publishing Co. has an affordable, easy-to-use system that provides total disaster recovery for their Exchange ecosystem. They can now use the backup system to make non-volatile copies of Dell AppAssure’s recovery points and move those of-site. They can rest easier knowing that fewer outages will occur over time, and when they do, they’ll be back online in minutes. That means fewer calls complaining and more productivity for everyone.

About Kalmbach Publishing Co.

At Kalmbach Publishing Co., we put customers at the core of our business as we have since 1934. We serve our customers through a variety of media channels including books, events, magazines, television partnerships, and Web sites. Our editors are active enthusiasts, and they share with their readers the same passion and curiosity for their leisure time pursuits. This shared passion forges long-term relationships between our customers and our products.

Kalmbach Publishing Co. produces 16 magazines and a host of special-interest publications (SIPs), as well as maintains nearly 30 Web sites. Our books department publishes about 35 books annually.