This is one of India's highest billing and most well-known law firms, with most of the major MNCs and telecom giants among its clientele. They have branches in 3 major Indian cities.

A law firm, specially one handling transnational corporate clients, is a team of very high-value knowledge professional. One lost hour of productivity for one lawyer means a direct revenue loss of hundreds of dollars. Other than the time spent in meetings, their work is almost entirely computer-based. Therefore their demand for IS infrastructure availability exceeds most other industry sectors. They approached us primarily to solve reliability problems with their IS infrastructure, and chose Merce after a trial period exceeding six months. They have very high security requirements on the flow of intellectual property and confidential information in and out of the firm and view leakage of documents with more seriousness than most other organisations.

This firm is currently using Merce running on Linux on high-end Intel hardware to manage email and Web access. The Merce master server has been configured in Mumbai with slave servers in Delhi and Bangalore. There are a total of fifteen servers today, out of which six run Merce on Linux, and the balance are used for running MS Windows-based applications using MS Terminal Services. An off-site backup server is also operational, for taking automatic data backups of the entire repository of emails and user files. Their mail servers process upward of 11,000 emails on any weekday, and detect more than 2,700 spam emails per day.

The legal professionals in this firm exchange documents over email, thus generating large message sizes and also loading the virus filter engines. They need to retain history of past transactions in the form of email folders, and thus it is quite usual for users to have mail folder sizes exceeding 2 GB. Merce's IMAP service handles these mail folders and delivers instantaneous response. Users use MS Outlook at the mail client of choice, connecting to the Merce IMAP service.

Merce SourceGuard, a patent-pending spam control technology has been deployed on the Merce server. This module carries out checks on the senders and logs the recipients of each mail. It allows fine-grained and intelligent filtering of messages into "clean" and "doubtful" streams. Merce Sourceguard presents the messages in separate mailboxes to each end-user, thus reducing the impact of spams. Typically 100% spams which pass through the spam filters are delivered by Merce Sourceguard to a separate mailbox for doubtful messages.

The Merce mail gateways have a highly configurable mail filtering rule base through which the administrator can create rules for sender-recipient and size based mail filtering. Mails which match the rules in the rulebase can be silently copied to a separate location, or deleted, or bounced back to the sender, or logged separately for special audit, etc., thus giving the administrator unprecedented power over his enterprise email flow.

It is a misconception that lawyers are employed in desk jobs and work during office hours. Officers and partners at our client firm work on most weekdays till 0300 hours or later, and other officers begin arriving for work between 0900 and 1000. Part of this is necessitated because of interactions with their clients in various timezones. Therefore, the IS infrastructure and network links need to be kept operational 24x6, and service availability requirements are extremely stringent. This directly impacts maintenance downtime availability. It is not unusual for server downtime to be made available four weeks in the future because of delivery pressures of users. Most sites by now have spare servers to allow round-robin maintenance activities.

Merce's disk usage monitoring subsystem provide drill-down reports on the disk usage of each individual user of the enterprise. Reports from all locations are aggregated centrally and reported in the Merce master interface.

This firm needs to share information between the 3 branches spread across the country. To facilitate this, Merce file servers provide reliable and secure storage of files. Users are unaware that their file server runs Linux; it appears as a Windows file server in their Network Neighbourhood. Users consistently report that speed of file access compares with accessing local files on a PC's hard disk.