Wortham Insurance Uses Cemaphore's MailShadow(R) for Seamless Email Continuity Following Hurricane Ike

2008-10-15 02:00:59 -

- Snapp Conner PR Cheryl Snapp Conner or Don Osmond, 801-994-9625 Cheryl@snappconner.com or don@snappconner.com Houston-based Wortham Insurance, Texas' largest privately held independent insurance broker, recently had the chance to put its disaster recovery plans to the test. Wortham depends on Cemaphore Systems' MailShadow(R) solution for Microsoft Exchange continuity and disaster recovery to protect its 300 Texas employees who work in

the company's Houston office.

MailShadow gives enterprises the ability to protect, replicate, failover and back thousands of individual mailboxes between geographically diverse, active, running Exchange servers within minutes.

"Being on the Gulf Coast we're no strangers to hurricanes, and being in the insurance business, it's imperative that we are always ready to communicate and handle our customers' claims," said Aaron Fowler, systems administrator for Wortham's 500 Texas employees. "We chose MailShadow because there is no other product that can deliver a real-time 'hot spare' of an Exchange database with a fast and simple failover process."

Wortham selected and installed MailShadow in the spring of 2007. In September, with the foreknowledge that the company's primary systems in Houston would at least lose power during Hurricane Ike, administrators failed over all Exchange mailboxes to the company's recovery site in Austin the day prior to Hurricane Ike.

Following the hurricane, the company continued to operate from its backup servers in Austin for approximately a week while they verified that the primary site was intact. At that point, Fowler was able to fail back close to 300 mailboxes, and he reports that not a single message, appointment or contact was lost. For the end users, the process was nearly transparent.

"I am pleased to report that not only was MailShadow the only product that could meet our criteria, but Cemaphore's technical support is also some of the best I have experienced in my 15 years in IT," Fowler added. "That's a very big deal for people like me who don't have the time to reverse engineer every product and implementation."

MailShadow allows organizations managing their own internal email continuity infrastructure to meet the fastest, fully populated Exchange mailbox recovery time objective (RTO) in the industry. MailShadow delivers under-10-minute RTO, with the first "shadow" mailboxes available to Outlook users within seconds.

MailShadow is widely used across many vertical industries, including financial, government and legal services. MailShadow takes a unique approach to messaging continuity by replicating transactions from selected mailboxes to corresponding shadow mailboxes on an active recovery Exchange server in a remote location. Mailbox data is replicated and transmitted across the WAN without heavy Exchange server and bandwidth demands that are inherent in other disaster recovery solutions. Furthermore, MailShadow can be streamlined to protect only the mailboxes essential for messaging continuity, which minimizes the resources required.

MailShadow and professional services are available from Cemaphore or through Cemaphore channel partners. Pricing varies with numbers of mailboxes included in the disaster recovery model.

About Cemaphore Systems, Inc.

Cemaphore Systems delivers unprecedented email continuity, disaster recovery and content management for businesses that demand greater uptime for their email systems. Able to synchronize business-critical content from disparate Microsoft Exchange servers, Cemaphore's flagship product, MailShadow 2.3, ensures the availability, integrity and reliability of email. A companion product, GeoShadow(TM), indexes and archives unstructured email content, enabling instant retrieval of email content and attachments from mobile devices. Cemaphore's new Software as a Service (SaaS) MailShadow offering lets end users and companies link Microsoft Outlook to external email service providers like Google, eliminating the need for costly infrastructure. Individuals and global enterprises trust Cemaphore to keep business-critical email content available.

For additional information, please call (650) 227-5400 or visit the company's Web site at www.cemaphore.com.

MailShadow Empowers Texas' Largest Privately Held Independent
Insurance Broker to Protect the Email of 300 Houston Employees