Marathon and Kerio Keep Bridge Digital’s Email Available - and the Orders Coming In
THE COMPANY
A multi-billion dollar hedge fund that has been awarded Hedge Fund Leader of the Year relies on Marathon software to deliver continuous email service.
Bridge Digital Inc. is a solutions integrator and value-added reseller of many “Best in Class” software and hardware technology products. For more than five years, the company’s specialty has been systems integration and support services for content storage and archive management software. Bridge Digital also specializes in all areas of digital technology for broadcasting including content management, transcoding, file delivery, network and storage infrastructure, fault tolerant systems and process workflow analysis. With office locations in Nashville, TN, Seattle, WA, and Cincinnati, OH, Bridge Digital offers an extraordinary level of support, installation and training for its small to mid-sized customer base spread through out the United States.
THE SITUATION
Whether delivering immediate and precise responses to customer inquiries or maintaining internal communications between its sales offices, email is a business-critical application for Bridge Digital. Email downtime costs the systems integrator revenue in lost sales and decreased productivity. The company needed a way to eliminate the frequent downtime they were experiencing with their existing servers.
Bridge Digital uses Kerio Technologies’ MailServer, which provides a secure messaging and collaboration solution with multiple anti-spam layers, anti-virus protection and a feature-rich Web mail interface. Bridge Digital wanted to ensure MailServer would not be vulnerable to single points of failure. They also wanted to protect the entire system with full redundancy and free their IT staff from the burden of unplanned downtime.
“Any downtime to our mail server would cause severe consequences including unprocessed sales orders and broken service agreements – ultimately resulting in customers’ taking their business elsewhere,” said Kerry Springer, sales and marketing manager for Bridge Digital. “When our Kerio MailServer was unavailable because of downtime, it would take at least an hour to get our email up and running again. We could no longer afford to lose time and money to downtime; for most of our offices, no email means no sales.”
In a quest for a solution that would ensure their email was always available, Bridge Digital considered a clustering solution, but found that clusters did not offer adequate protection, were too complex and to time-consuming to manage.
THE SOLUTION
The company’s extensive research led them to Marathon Technologies, a fault tolerant-class availability solutions provider based in Massachusetts. Bridge Digital evaluated Marathon’s everRun, the company’s award-winning, availability software solution. With everRun, the software synchronizes two standard Windows servers to create a virtual application environment that is inherently protected from downtime. Data integrity is guaranteed by keeping an exact copy on the secondary server to ensure zero data loss in the event of a failure.
Bridge Digital’s staff was impressed by the level of availability everRun provided, combined with the fact that it was easy to implement and more cost-effective than other alternatives such as clustering. “everRun™ provides our Kerio MailServer with significantly greater level of protection than failover solutions,” said Springer. “We were pleased with the ease of implementation; we were set up with the software within a couple of hours and haven’t had to touch it since. It just keeps going.”
THE RESULTS
Today, Bridge Digital relies on Marathon’s everRun software to deliver continuous email service. Since the company finished the everRun implementation, its Kerio MailServer has maintained the highest level of availability in spite of systems and hardware failures.
“From partners to prospective clients, there is an increased expectation that e-mail will be responded to immediately,” added Springer. “With Marathon, we are confident that our mail server will be robust, reliable and continuously available. We recommend Marathon everyday to customers and have already established plans to move additional applications onto Marathon’s everRun solution.”
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RELATED INFORMATION
PROFILE
System integrator
Specializes in digital technology for broadcasting
ENVIRONMENT
HP Proliant ML110
Marathon everRun HA
WINDOWS APPLICATION
Kerio Mail Server