In the past, he said, data was backed up on tape and then sent "off to a disaster recovery vendor, with the hope that they could rebuild our systems within 48 hours. We quickly learned the human factor that was involved wasn't something you could plan on."

The company began mirroring the data shortly after the storage upgrade effort began, when it installed a Network Appliance Inc. FAS940 array running NetApp's SnapMirror software. The new system can perform block-level backup of data across dedicated Fibre Channel networks and Ethernet-based LANs through the use of iSCSI.

By moving off of direct- attached storage and onto a storage-area network using iSCSI, Schwalbe said, CNL quadrupled the amount of storage space on 1,400 Exchange mailboxes to 500MB each.

The new storage architecture has also improved reliability, he said. Prior to installing the NetApp array, the firm had three separate Exchange file servers that couldn't run for a week without problems cropping up, Schwalbe said.

"We use a lot fewer resources to manage the backups and restores than we did before. CNL probably cut the equivalent of a [full-time worker]," Schwalbe said.