Supermarket group Somerfield is only now migrating off
its legacy NT4/Exchange 5.5 e-mail server onto Exchange 2003, more
than two years after Microsoft ceased offering mainstream support
for the product.
Somerfield is among the last UK major businesses to be using
Exchange 5.5, but Colin Clarke, the group's business control
executive, said the supermarket chain was able to mitigate the
risks associated with remaining on 5.5 and overcome other
limitations of the product through its use of Symantec's Enterprise
Vault e-mail archiving system.
The software has allowed Somerfield to extend the useful life of
Exchange 5.5 by over-riding the 30Mbte limit on end-users' e-mail
baskets size set by Exchange. To protect the e-mail server,
Somerfield has also put in place intrusion detection software.
"Before we installed Enterprise Vault in 2002, housekeeping in
Exchange 5.5 was a nightmare," said Clarke. "Recovering old e-mail
was impossible." With the e-mail archive tool, Clarke said he was
able to recover e-mail within seconds. The system manages 12.5
million e-mail messages which consumes 30Gbytes of storage.
If all goes to plan, Somerfield should have migrated onto
Exchange 2003 running on Windows 2003 Server over the next three
months.
Clarke said having Enterprise Vault in place already would take
some of the strain out of the upgrade. "It means that any loss of
data on conversion is not as critical as it would otherwise
be."
The migration over to Exchange 2003 necessitated upgrading from
NT4 Server to Windows 2003 Server, Clark added, as well as
implementing Microsoft's Active Directory infrastructure.
The move involves 3,500 users and links to operational systems
like the mainframe and banking systems used by Somerfield.
According to Clarke, the project is "carefully planned" and has the
buy-in of staff in every part of the business.