Download a PDF version of BlueArc's Global Relay Case Study
Global Relay offers customers the most reliable and scalable hosted message archiving services infrastructure on the market, with leading network storage technology from BlueArc being a key component. Titan enables high-speed access to indexed messaging data through deployment of a rock-solid architecture designed in hardware, built to scale without compromise. Global Relay customers know that with BlueArc as the core of their customer storage, their data is safe, secure, and instantly retrievable.
Global Relay provides enterprise-class hosted e-mail and instant message archival, compliance and electronic discovery services to a wide array of customers, including the securities brokerage, banking and healthcare industries. The company's services manage, protect and secure customers' critical business communications, in parallel with delivering best in class archival, filtering, search, retrieval and monitoring capabilities.
Global Relay's technology provides businesses with highly secure offsite storage and backup, while satisfying all compliance, privacy, security, business continuity, corporate governance, audit and litigation requirements.
"BlueArc was selected because of the capability to replicate data, and the scalability to address our biggest concerns - performance, and the total data storage need for compliance archiving and electronic discovery."
"There was no alternative - we looked at NetApp, we looked at EMC, we would not have purchased any of those products as they could not appropriately satisfy our requirements."
"Titan is blindingly fast. Ultimately, it's the I/O of BlueArc's silicon-based technology that outperforms NetApp's and EMC's processor- based technologies. We wanted something that was engineered for performance."
-- Warren Roy,For businesses whose data can come under scrutiny by federal agencies, including the SEC, the ability to instantly identify and access a consolidated archive of a company's e-mail and instant messages in the event of subpoena or document demand, can be the difference between winning the case, or being found liable for millions of dollars in damages. To serve this highly-regulated market, Global Relay demanded a rock-solid data storage platform that would eliminate the possibility for message loss, while also providing unparalleled performance and scalability in capacity, as well as the ability to address a rapidly growing customer base. To satisfy business continuity and disaster recovery requirements, the company needed to mirror data between geographically dispersed centers in real time, delivering bulletproof reliability. Global Relay also required an option to utilize Write Once, Read Many (WORM) file storage, for regulatory compliance on a message, group or folder basis.
Knowing the company needed to provide an enterprise class storage solution with leading performance, capacity and reliability features, Global Relay looked at solutions from leading vendors, including EMC, Network Appliance and BlueArc. Yet with the company's core business being e-mail messaging, BlueArc's Titan stood far above the rest - holding the world record for messaging capacity and performance, delivering the equivalent of 30 million messages per day on the SPECmail benchmark, a standardized test developed by messaging vendors and research organizations.
Global Relay initially deployed a pair of Titan systems with more than 30 terabytes of multi-tiered storage, delivering high-speed access to data through Fibre Channel arrays, and lower cost storage through Serial ATA disks, as well as WORM storage for compliance - effectively delivering three essential storage environments in a single device. Global Relay has since upgraded the Titans to address nearly fifty terabytes of capacity, and retains the ability to continue expanding through hundreds of terabytes per device.
For today's leading businesses, e-mail messaging is their lifeblood, and instant access to this data, whether for internal or external review, is essential. In an increasingly-regulated marketplace, the ability to index, archive and efficiently conduct customized searches, filtering and monitoring of corporate messaging can reduce legal costs by millions of dollars and avoid companies finding themselves on the wrong side of a judge's decision or an SEC audit.
Global Relay differentiates itself from competitors on the market by archiving customer data in real-time, before legal actions are needed, in a proactive approach, rather than a reactive response. The company delivers high-speed offsite storage and backup, and for the last seven years, has provided outsourced messaging solutions without a single security breach or incident of data loss.
To continue this impeccable record, while expanding the company's capabilities to take on increasing customer demand, Global Relay has invested in the ultimate levels of reliability, implementing BlueArc as the core message storage platform in its mirrored data centers situated on the East and West coasts of North America, as well as for its systems build out in the United Kingdom. Global Relay selected BlueArc to replicate data between data centers, to store data in WORM format for compliance, and address the company's biggest concerns - performance, scalability, and total storage capacity.
Driving the market for message archiving is a number of factors - including regulatory compliance, message management, business continuity and litigation discovery. Global Relay customers are recognizing the productivity boost delivered through having one company provide disaster recovery and business continuity of data, effectively offering mirrored copies of critical data, safely stored. In a regulatory environment where stringent SEC data demands can require a comprehensive response within 24 hours, businesses need to know their data is safe, available and immediately accessible.
"We are in an industry where we cannot lose a message under any circumstance ever," said Warren Roy, President and CEO of Global Relay. "There is an ever growing amount of data to index, store, manage, and mirror. BlueArc delivers a single system that meets our complex requirements. Alternatively, we would have had to utilize multiple vendors' solutions, and the manpower alone needed to manage the solution would have cost more than Titan."
Global Relay's diverse business also demands a diverse data infrastructure - one served by BlueArc. As a single hosted provider, Global Relay can offer a unified suite of services to the customer, encompassing hosted email filtering, enterprise email, hosted IM security, enterprise instant messaging and LSC, Blackberry and Bloomberg conversion, all being captured and indexed by Global Relay's flagship technologies, the Message Archiver and the Compliance Reviewer. Through the deployment of Titan, Global Relay has delivered a greatly simplified storage infrastructure while providing a sophisticated solution which does not compromise features, performance or capacity. BlueArc's storage solution also eliminates countless expenses that would have been necessary if competing solutions had been selected.
Titan's value doesn't end with meeting today's already challenging needs. Global Relay, following significant research, came away with the knowledge that Titan's modular, hardware-based architecture was engineered to meet tomorrow's demands without costly system replacement or data migration - where competing systems simply could not match up. Titan offers the best solution built to meet Global Relay's demanding requirements, and is engineered to deliver the ultimate in performance.
With companies in regulated markets making headlines for their failure to adequately store and retrieve sensitive data, Global Relay has taken the lead through offering a service aimed to accelerate messaging storage and retrieval, alongside concrete security and protection. As the company's services continue to see global adoption in fast-growing US and European markets, BlueArc's Titan rose to the top as the storage solution to house Global Relay's customer data - through uncompromising performance, capacity scaling, and reliability.
Global Relay prides itself on protecting customer data - having never suffered a single lost message in the company's seven-year history. With BlueArc deployed in the company's multiple data centers, offering a fully-redundant solution, Global Relay is poised to extend that unmatched record further, as they grow through hundreds of terabytes - safely and securely.