Ardagh Glass Case Study

Ardagh Glass is known globally for excellence in glass manufacture and is the preferred packaging supplier for many of the world’s largest food and beverage brands.
Starting life as “Irish Glass Bottle Company” in 1932, the business, now known as Ardagh Glass,
has grown to become one of Europe’s largest glass packaging manufacturers.

Ardagh Glass operates 20 manufacturing sites in 7 countries (Germany, UK, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and Italy) with the headquarters based in Dublin, Ireland. The business employs over 6000 people and produces over 13 billion glass containers each year.

Brighter Connections contacted Ardagh Glass as part of a telemarketing exercise in July 2009. At the time, they were in the process of evaluating different e-mail archiving products on the market and were happy to look closer at the Cryoserver solution that Brighter Connections had to offer…..

“Simply E-Mail Archiving”

Paul Wilson, Messaging Manager at Ardagh Glass’s Knottingley site, spent several months researching and investigating a number of e-mail archiving products on the market. “The purpose was to find a product that did e-mail archiving in a simple, cost effective way,” explains Paul. “Needless to say, all the solutions we looked at offered compliance with current regulations, but some solutions were clearly more than just an ‘e-mail archive’.”
Ardagh Glass had a specific archive requirement - they wanted it just for e-mail. The other significant feature of the “simply e-mail archiving” system was that it should be an agnostic solution when it came to e-mail. In other words, the company wanted the ability to archive e-mail from ANY mail platform without too much hassle. Paul continues, “Ardagh Glass has grown via acquisition, and as a consequence of this, an adaptable and scalable solution to simplify any potential future growth was required.”

Why Cryoserver?

There were 3 overriding factors which helped Paul and his colleagues to decide to choose the Cryoserver e-mail archiving solution:

It frees up storage space…
Cryoserver enables e-mails to be offloaded from the mail server to a secure repository. All e-mails are replaced with a stub, freeing up valuable and costly storage space on the SAN. The effect of this process meant that the current nightly backup carried out by Ardagh Glass would drop by up to a third.
Forensic fingerprinting….
Cryoserver is much more than a standard e-mail archiving solution; it is a permanent, forensic e-mail compliance archive which enables you to gather, store and index every e-mail and attachment sent to, from and within the organisation. Every e-mail is recorded, forensically finger printed, encrypted, compressed and stored. E-mails cannot be deleted or tampered with and so carry evidential weight in a court of law. This would be an advantage for Ardagh Glass who deal with many customer specifications by e-mail and so may need to refer back to the original e-mail sent by the customer to verify the specification agreed.
The cost
Cryoserver met Ardagh Glass’s specific requirements while being one of the cheapest solutions amongst the 7 they had reviewed!

And the Benefits?

Email Migration
Being an acquisitions company and being faced with the need to standardise all companies in the group as far as IT practices are concerned, Cryoserver gives Ardagh the ability to use a 1 step process of archiving old e-mail during a migration, rather than a 2 step process of migrating it first and then archiving it later, which was used previously.

Reduced Backup Time
Backups don’t take as long now due to reduced storage space used. A total of over 4 million e-mails are currently stored which have only used 6% of available disk space! Backups used to take 10-12 hours but Paul is hoping to reduce this by approx 50% - stubbing is to be introduced which should reduce users’ mail boxes by 50%.

Easy Email Retrieval
This is both rapid (a powerful search facility allows archived e-mails to be retrieved in seconds by searching date range, recipient, keywords and sound like) and time saving as it eliminates the need to order backup tapes to be returned to site. Employees can search and retrieve their own e-mails, reducing the impact on the IT Department. With over 3000 e-mail users, it used to be a time consuming and laborious process to recover a deleted e-mail, which can now be retrieved in seconds by the user themselves.

The Future…..

Paul concludes, “We are still some way from getting maximum benefit from the Cryoserver appliance, but we are extremely impressed with what we have so far. Once we start the automated monthly stubbing of e-mail in place, we will have achieved what we set out to do – namely keeping our mail system operating efficiently with the resources we have now, while having room for growth in the future without major spending on IT resources.

For further information on Cryoserver, please contact Brighter Connections on 03707 551515 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)