Failure Prompts Brewery to Tap Hosted E-mail Service

Computerworld - Boulevard Brewing Co., which filled its first keg of beer nearly 20 years ago, certainly understands the value of serving its beverages ice cold. Unfortunately, the Midwestern brewery has also discovered that a whole company can become frozen in its tracks because of inaccessible and lost e-mail.

Before upgrading its IT infrastructure to its current setup of 12 Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. servers, VMware Inc. virtualization software and a hosted e-mail service last year, Boulevard Brewing had relied on a single Microsoft Corp. Windows NT-based server to run its operation.

The single server proved inadequate in late 2005, when a hardware failure cut off access to Boulevards e-mail system, causing the organization to lose two days of productivity.

We had people literally say, I cant work; I need to go home. The company was shut down, said Tony Lux, purveyor of technology at the Kansas City, Mo.-based brewery. When the server went down and e-mail went down, we were [helpless].

Lux said e-mail was the companys primary vehicle for communicating with its 75 distributors and for booking tours of the brewery.

It was down for two days, and it just killed us. Theres no way well ever recover that [lost revenue]. You only have to go through that once to be taught a very big lesson, he said.

Lux acknowledged that the server and e-mail mishap was not related to budget issues  it was the result of a lack of planning.

He said the company turned to MessageOne Inc.s Email Management Services (EMS) hosted e-mail service this year.

The EMS system promises to help manage the brewerys Microsoft Exchange e-mail environment and incorporate fail-over into the system in order to avoid a loss of access to e-mail, Lux said.

Once EMS is activated, Boulevards domain name server begins assigning IP addresses to the e-mail accounts and instantly migrates everyone to a MessageOne secondary server housing 30 days of users e-mail and their contact information, Lux said.

Users can view their e-mail through a Web interface to the EMS system, he noted.

As more and more businesses shift toward using e-mail as a mechanism for processing orders rather than simply as a communication medium, unmanaged data stores and slow response times could prove to be more perilous than they once were, according to Mike Osterman, president of Black Diamond, Wash.-based Osterman Research Inc.

The timeliness of e-mail delivery is becoming much more critical, said Osterman. If theres an outage, he said, you may be unaware of [incoming] orders that are especially time-sensitive or from a very big client.

Lux said he has encountered only minor problems with EMS: He had to loosen the products spam filter, and many users have complained about incessant e-mail notifications from MessageOne regarding virus captures.