Case Study: Goodhue County, MN
Goodhue County, MN RazorSafe Email Archiving Appliance
“We had a different email-archiving product we thought was going to be just wonderful, and it turned out to be hopelessly terrible,”
– Randy Johnson, IT Director for Goodhue County, MN
THE CHALLENGE
The product was archiving email for the county, but the Search functions were underpowered. “It didn’t work,” Johnson said. “No Boolean. Also, the support was hopeless. It was a nightmare.”
Goodhue County required a product that would not only archive email, but also allow its IT director to efficiently search and produce emails for eDiscovery and public information requests or Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) purposes. “I knew we had to find something else,” Johnson said.
THE SOLUTION
Johnson met an Intradyn sales engineer at an IT group meeting and learned more about the Intradyn RazorSafe line of email archiving appliances. “I realized, ‘wow, this is cool,’ ” Johnson said.
“We like appliance-based solutions: lean and mean, set it and forget it, out of sight, out of mind,” Johnson said. “As opposed to something on a Windows® server: then, you’ve got to do patches and updates all the time. We just went to Exchange 2010® from 2007 and when you do that, there are a million things involved. A lot of things were broken for a while. But when I changed the RazorSafe pointers to the new server, it worked just fine. That was easy!”
THE CONCLUSION
Johnson purchased a three-year service contract —the typical appliance service period for Goodhue County— but doesn’t foresee any problems with his RazorSafe.
“Our joint hardware and software coverage is less expensive than what most of our competition charges just for software coverage,” Kieffer said. “Intradyn’s competition typically offers two agreements: one for software, and one for hardware. When you add the two of those together in the case of competitors, the annual cost is between 45-51% of MSRP, annually. If you only buy the software support from our competitors, that typically costs 28% of MSRP. Intradyn’s service contract costs between 20-22% of MSRP, and it covers both hardware and software,” Kieffer says. “We have just one agreement, and that’s that.”
