Mohawk Industries is a leading supplier of flooring for both residential and commercial applications. The company markets premier brands such as Karastan, Ralph Lauren, Lees, Bigelow, Dal-Tile and American Olean.

Challenge

Mohawk, with approximately 9,000 email users, sends and receives approximately 170,000 emails every day. Over time, the company had accumulated a significant amount of email—7.5 terabytes to be exact.

Such a large quantity of email was causing numerous challenges for the company. Servers were taking upwards of 7 days to back up email files. Diminishing disk space was causing performance issues with the mail server. Costs were growing exponentially; and if nothing was done soon, additional storage would need to be purchased. To top it all off, accumulating so much email required material effort to manage during any litigation.

Mohawk knew that an email archiving solution was necessary and set out to evaluate the leading solutions on the market. Mohawk required the solution to do the following:

1. Enforce retention policy.
2. Allow legal holds to be placed on users in the event of litigation.
3. Keep track of every message going in and out of the company, as well as internal messages among employees.
4. Enable the legal department to manage email searches and legal holds themselves without depending on IT resources.

Mohawk invited three vendors to conduct Proofs of Concept, one of which was IBM and its CommonStore email archiving solution. As IBM’s go-to business partner for email management, Integro conducted the IBM Proof of Concept.

After several failed or flawed attempts by the other two vendors, Integro was the only vendor to successfully get the pilot server up and running on the first try, and they did it in exactly 12.5 minutes. By the end of the proof of concept, Integro had satisfied each of Mohawk’s solution requirements without a hitch. Mohawk was able to select the IBM solution and the Integro implementation team with confidence.

“Integro was key to the selection of CommonStore. They came in and succeeded where the other companies failed!" - Colby Grueber, Senior Domino Administration Manager, Mohawk Industries

Solution

In less than one week, Integro had the archiving system in place, archiving 9,000 user mail boxes and capturing every single email.

IBM CommonStore is the archiving engine, IBM Content Manager manages the archived content, and all archived email is stored in an EMC Centerra storage system. IBM Advanced Email Search manages the search capabilities.

The solution utilizes journaling to capture all email that comes in and out of Mohawk’s mail system. Emails that come across the mail router are put into a journal archive database and then moved to IBM Content Manager.

The solution also offers Mohawk advanced search capabilities. In addition to the search functionality gained through IBM Email Search, Integro also custom-built a mail template in Lotus Notes Domino that allows Mohawk’s legal and technical staff to conduct very complex Boolean searches. All the emails are full-text indexed to enable any type of search.

Once the archiving process was active for all new email activity, Integro helped Mohawk put all the old email files into the archive. Using the email crawler utility in CommonStore, Integro culled existing email files across three mail servers and moved them into the archive.

Results

In only a few short months of archiving mail for its 9,000 users, Mohawk has already seen drastic benefits. In fact, the company expects the new archiving solution to pay for itself in just over 2 years.

Storage savings have been tremendous, with single instance storage offering the greatest savings point. Even with several months’ archiving activity, and all archived mail stored in the repository, Mohawk has hardly put a dent in the 7.5 terabytes of available space on its EMC Centerra. Mohawk estimates a savings of at least 5:1 from using single instance storage. In addition to space and cost savings, Mohawk now has more sophisticated systems and policies in place to effectively manage and track its email. The legal department can easily search all email and can put users on legal hold when necessary.

Finally, the entire solution is completely transparent to Mohawk’s 9,000 users. Nothing changed at all for the users and absolutely no training was necessary.

“The experience working with Integro has been fantastic. Perhaps our biggest appreciation is that it wasn’t just Monday through Friday, 8am-5pm support. Integro worked late nights and weekends. They fixed things before we even know they were problems.” - Colby Grueber