Brokerage Firm Zips Through Email

Brokerage firm Morgan Keegan has used an email archiving system for compliance since 1998, yet compliance remains front and center among its IT priorities.

The Memphis, Tenn.-based financial services firm is on its third email archiving application, and rolled out its first archiving storage system in June. The staff will soon pour other financial documents into it, and is preparing for new rules governing civil litigation that take effect Dec. 1. (See Retention Rules Set to Change.)

All the while, the email flows in and out. Parker Mabry, SVP of network systems, says the firm has about 3,500 employees on Exchange and stores about 4 million emails per month in addition to instant messages -- all subject to industry and internal regulators and auditors.

"When regulators come in and request information, most of the statutes say our email has to be readily accessible," senior Exchange engineer Chris Godsey says. "No regulatory body has said 'readily accessible' means this many hours or this many days. It's at the discretion of the regulator. If he's having a bad day, he might say he wants it today."

Morgan Keegan has more than 300 offices in 18 states and $596 million in equity capital. Its regulators include the SEC, New York Stock Exchange, and NASD, as well as internal auditors, accountant Ernst & Young, and Sarbanes-Oxley consultant PriceWaterhouseCooper. Lawsuits involving Morgan Keegan or companies it does business with also frequently require the retrieval of email."We're pulling mail for four separate legal requests right now, spanning from seven years ago to the present," Godsey says.

In June, Morgan Keegan installed Assureon content-addressed storage (CAS) systems from Nexsan in its main data center and disaster recovery site to facilitate the storage and retrieval of documents. Eventually, the firm will use Assureon for all its business documents but for now is migrating email archived with ZipLip's Unified E-Mail Archival Suite. (See Nexsan Encrypts CAS and ZipLip Joins Nexsan.)

Before Assureon, Morgan Keegan was moving all its mail to its EMC Clariion SANs, then archiving to tape.

"We wanted to store it all on disk as well as archive it on tape," Godsey says. "There it's readily accessible. There were too many steps from the receipt of email to its final destination that could disrupt the process. We wanted to simplify that."

The CAS system also uses single instancing to store one copy of duplicate documents, which Mabry estimates will eventually reduce his storage requirements by 40 percent."That gives us smaller backup windows," Mabry says. "I'm looking forward to being able to finish backups in a night again."

Morgan Keegan uses EMC for its primary storage, and had Nexsan SATABoy and SATABeast disk backup systems. Mabry says when he decided to go with a CAS system, he quickly narrowed his choices to EMC's Centera and Assureon.

Centera requires applications to use APIs to read and write to it natively. Also, Centera has a 40 million object limit per node. If you reach the limit, you need to buy another node.

"That was huge," Mabry says, "considering we were going to put in 120 million emails in the first three months. One email could be up to 10 objects. Our object limit was going to be 440 million. EMC said we'd never reach it but with 120 million emails, we said we'd never make it."

Mabry says he expects to finish migrating email to Assureon next month. "Archiving email is our primary use for it," he says. "Once it gets up and going, we'll start with document management. Then we'll do backups on there."Morgan Keegan turned to ZipLip for email -- which now takes up about 7 Tbytes -- in 2004. The firm started with Assentor from SRA International in 1998 because that was about all that was out there. Ilumin acquired Assentor from SRA in 2002, and CA acquired Ilumin last October. (See CA Buys Archiver.)

In 2002, Mabry says he had more products to choose from and switched to SAMS Online from Entellagent because it was more customizable. Entellagent also let customers do a "pre-review," which will stop emails from being sent out if they contain certain words or phrases that could violate compliance rules. A company's internal compliance reviewers can check the messages to see if they can be sent.

"The caveat with pre-review is that the compliance system has to sit in the mailfow," Godsey says. "All mail flow depends on that application working. Entellagent would get overwhelmed with search requests and slow down the mail server, and sometimes even stop it."

Morgan Keegan switched over to ZipLip in 2004, after doing extensive testing to make sure it could carry out a pre-review without bringing Exchange to a halt. "ZipLip doesn't even slow our email down," Godsey says. "And it's lightweight because it uses Java. It works with all operating systems and databases, and it doesn't take much to run it."

Still, Morgan Keegan is waiting for improvements from ZipLip and Nexsan. Godsey anticipates ZipLip adding what he calls "power searching" to make it easier to search 120 million or so email messages. "We'd like to see some improved search features," he says. "If the SEC says, 'We want to see three months worth of email for 10 people,' we can't plug in those 10 names and that timeframe. They're developing that capability now."Godsey has a minor request from Nexsan. "When Assureon stores files, it writes logs to an area on a C partition and that gets larger as data gets put in," he says. "We recommended they move those logs off after they synch data or purge them. They're working on that now."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch