• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

Watch this dSPACE!

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 3 - May 2007

When one of Germany's most innovative high-tech companies was looking for a solution to manage its email, a key requirement was the ability to meet the organisation's necessarily high standards

The engineers at Paderborn-based dSPACE GmbH develop hardware and software for designing and developing control unit software and mechatronic controls. The company's customers include some of the biggest and best-known international automobile and aerospace organisations, to which dSPACE delivers systems that operate in real time and to the greatest precision.

As a natural extension to this, the company demands similarly high specifications in the systems it uses to run and manage its business. Email archiving is no exception.

EASY Xbase - Everything under control
Even in the 21st century, car engines continue to function on the combustion principle. Yet today they have attained a level of efficiency and cleanness that once seemed unthinkable.

This is largely due to the use of smart control systems that ensure optimum interaction between individual system components at any time and under any circumstances.

But getting such systems to a point where they are trouble-free and ready for the production lines takes a long time. dSPACE's tools help to reduce that time delay, as well as the costs that are involved, by enabling simulation of complex control checks. This allows faster, more efficient and thorough development and testing, enabling production deadlines to be met on time.

Because time is so valuable in dSPACE's business, efficient communication between team members, and with customers and suppliers, is critical. In dSPACE's case, 80% of this communication is via email correspondence, so the company cannot afford to be restricted by slow performance or poor email organisation.

The challenge
By 2003, the organisation's workforce - of more than 500 employees throughout the world, 70% of whom are engineers - had accumulated a volume of some 100Gb of emails, which were subject to retention. Mailbox size was steadily increasing, threatening permanent server overload.

Although dSPACE's existing email solution provided a full text search capability for emails in online mode, it did not provide any such option for offline content. This posed a serious problem, as the company began to look at archiving non-active email content on to cheaper storage media, as a way of improving system performance, while reducing overheads.

dSPACE needed an email archiving and search facility that would remove the burden from the server, reduce mailbox size and, at the same time, allow search/retrieval in both online and offline modes.

EASY xBASE solution from EASY Software provided a perfect match. Says Andreas Kleine, manager of dSPACE's IT organisation: "Above all, we were delighted with EASY's great flexibility in adjusting the product to our requirements.

“EASY immediately accommodated our requirements for implementing offline full text search and the option of changing archived emails," he explains. "Another important aspect to us was avoiding any disruption of day-to-day operation, where possible. When our employees returned to the office the Monday after the system had been migrated, EASY xBASE was running on their workstations. Everything else remained unchanged."

dSPACE GmbH has been using EASY xBASE since September 2004. The solution comprises an archive server with a capacity of 270Gb, 150Gb of which is being used for mail archiving and indexing.

The original Exchange 5.5 server has been replaced with the current 2003 version. EASY xBASE added value here, too.

Says Kleine: "Before upgrading to Exchange 2003, we archived all mail items using EASY xBASE, reducing mailbox size. This was a significant factor in enabling a rapid, trouble-free migration."

totally connected
Today, all dSPACE computer workstations in Germany, the UK and France are connected to EASY xBASE. Archiving is performed at the headquarters in Paderborn.

From the initial planning phase starting at the end of 2003, to going live in 2004, took less than 10 months. In addition to secure, off-site storage and extremely fast search/retrieval, Kleine enthuses about the optimised administrative processes enabled by the tool.

"In real-time operation, administrative effort is almost nil! Archiving is performed overnight, while the next morning only a brief check is made on how much data was archived. This takes less than a minute." ST