Li & Fung Limited to Double Users Mailbox Size, Cut Future Storage Costs in Half

As one of the worlds leading export trading companies for apparel and hard goods, Li & Fung Limited depends heavily on its messaging solution to communicate internally and with suppliers and customers. But with user mailboxes restricted to 1 gigabyte, employees had to archive messages frequently, making it difficult to track projects from beginning to end. In addition, failover didnt happen as quickly as the IT staff wanted. To solve these issues, Li & Fung became an early adopter of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, deploying it to 150 pilot users in September 2009. With the solution, Li & Fung expects to significantly improve its system availability and simplify failover procedures. The company also plans to double users mailbox size, fully utilize its existing storage, and reduce future fixed storage costs by half.

Situation
Founded in 1906 and headquartered in Hong Kong, Li & Fung Limited is one of the worlds largest supply chain management and export trading companies. Part of the Li & Fung Group, it orchestrates nearly 15,000 international suppliers in more than 40 economies to serve approximately 2,000 customers. In 2007, Li & Fung migrated its messaging solution from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client. It currently uses Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Office Outlook 2007 with SP2. E-mail is extremely important in our company because we coordinate supply chains across multiple countries, says Manuel Fernandez, Group Chief Technology Officer at Li & Fung Limited. For a shirt thats manufactured in China, for example, materials might come from India, and washing and dyeing might be done in China, so coordination with our suppliers is key. We rely on e-mail to communicate among our own offices and also with our distributors and supply chain partners. Exchange Server is as critical an application to our business as our enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management solutions.

Weve done a lot of testing of a Database Availability Group and its working quite well, so we are looking forward to migrating to Exchange Server 2010 in our production environment. Manuel Fernandez Group Chief Technology Officer Li & Fung Limited

To support about 14,000 employees, Li & Fung operates several Exchange Server 2007 installations around the world. The headquarters installation has 11,000 mailboxes for users in China and 15 other countries including Mexico, Guatemala, and Pakistan. The installation includes three clustered servers supported by two storage area networks (SANs) with about 400 Fibre Channel disks in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 5 configuration. Hong Kong is the hub for e-mail servicesall incoming and outgoing e-mail messages in every location go through Hong Kong for antivirus filtering.

Li & Fung supports an additional 3,000 users with Exchange Server 2007 installations in the United Kingdom, Europe, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States. Together, all mailbox databases total about 12 terabytes. Li & Fung focuses on its employees end-user experiences. We recently surveyed users and out of 3,500 responses, overwhelmingly, the top request was for more mailbox storage, followed by improved performance, says Fernandez. Users need larger mailboxes because a lot of their email communication includes product design packages, which contain quite large attachments. The majority of employees mailboxes are 1 gigabyte (GB); executives and power users currently have 2-GB mailboxes. With 1 GB, users can store only about two months worth of messages in their mailboxes before they have to archive messages in Outlook Data Files (PST files). An order cycle can be as long as four months, so a mailbox that can store only two months worth of messages is not large enough to support a current working project, says Fernandez. To restore an archived message, a user must get it from a local PST file and then copy the message to the users Exchange Server mailbox. That obviously reduces productivity, especially when users have multiple PST files. For users who travel to branch offices and customer sites daily, e-mail presents an added challenge. Before they travel, they must plan ahead to make sure they have archived enough messages to keep their mailboxes within the 1-GB limit. When users mailboxes exceed the limit, they can still receive e-mail but they cannot reply, so, in effect, they cannot work, says Curie Cheung, Exchange Server Technical Lead at Li & Fung Limited. When users need access to older messages, they have to ask a colleague to transfer a PST file onto that persons desktop, find the message, and then forward that message. This is a lot of work that definitely affects their productivity. From an IT perspective, Li & Fung wanted to address high availability, disaster recovery, and storage costs. In Hong Kong, where the largest Exchange Server installation is deployed, Li & Fung uses Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) for We hope to get good disaster recovery, but is not completely satisfied with that solution. performance with We run servers in pairs, one active and one passive, and connect the Exchange Server 2010 two with CCR technology, says Cheung. In theory, when we have after we expand the an issue in an active server, we should be able to fail over to the user mailbox size to 2 cluster very quickly to restore the service. But in reality, its a 5 GB. If we do, then we manual process that doesnt occur as quickly as wed like, says will be very happy. Cheung. Since installing Exchange Server 2007 SP1, the Curie Cheung environment is much more stable, but we still would like to improve Exchange Server availability further. Technical Lead Li & Fung Limited Because Li & Fung wants to increase the size of users mailboxes, storage is also a consideration. The company already manages two SANs with several hundred Fibre Channel disks to support its 12terabyte mailbox database. The database will obviously continue to grow, especially if we

increase the user mailbox size. At the same time, wed like to not significantly increase our storage costs, says Fernandez. Li & Fung is pleased with Exchange Server 2007 SP2, however, it wants to further increase the availability of e-mail services for its users, improve its disaster recovery plan, and use storage more effectively so it can expand user mailboxes.

Solution
Li & Fung is a longtime user of Microsoft products, so it was eager to evaluate new features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. E-mail is a significant investment for our company, so we continually upgrade itlike all of our systems and platformsand hope to be early adopters whenever possible, says Fernandez. In September 2009, Li & Fung began using Exchange Server 2010 on HP ProLiant G6 blade server computers with about 150 pilot users. When the pilot is finished, the company plans to migrate all users to the new environment within two months. From what weve seen so far, I expect that process to be relatively seamless, says Cheung. The new Database Availability Group feature in Exchange Server 2010 is particularly interesting to Li & Fung because of the high availability it provides. A Database Availability Group is a set of mailbox servers that uses continuous replication to provide automatic database recovery from disk, server, or data center failures. With a Database Availability Group, organizations can recover from a single database failure at a single site or across sites without interrupting other normal database services on the same clustered server. Exchange Server 2010 also delivers up to a 70 percent improvement in disk input/output (I/O) compared with Exchange Server 2007. That means Exchange Server 2010 has less demanding storage requirements and, as a result, supports more affordable storage options such as Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks. We have tested Exchange Server 2010 in a virtualized, hybridserver environment that simulates our Exchange Server 2007 SP2 Although reducing production environment and we have not had any problems, says costs is not our primary Fernandez. Weve done a lot of testing of a Database Availability objective, SATA disks Group and its working quite well, so we are looking forward to are half the price of migrating to Exchange Server 2010 in our production environment. Fibre Channel disks, so we can cut our future fixed storage costs in Benefits half. Li & Fung expects that Exchange Server 2010 will provide many Curie Cheung benefits for users, including larger mailboxes and improved Exchange Server performance and availability. For the IT staff, server recovery Technical Lead procedures and disaster plans will be simpler, and it will be able to Li & Fung Limited

use less expensive storage options.

Enhanced User Experience

Although the IT staff at Li & Fung is interested in many of the new technical improvements in Exchange Server 2010, improving the end-user experience is its top priority. We want to give users better performance and minimize downtime; in fact, we dont want them to have any issues at all, says Fernandez. Weve been able to do a fairly good job of that under a controlled environment in Hong Kong, and we expect to do even more so in an upgraded Exchange Server 2010 environment. Because Exchange Server 2010 now supports affordable SATA disks, Li & Fung can fulfill its users most common request: larger mailboxes. It plans to expand most users mailboxes to 2 GB and give executives and power users up to 5 GB. With larger mailboxes, made possible by Exchange Server 2010, users who travel can keep more messages in their mailboxes and still have access to them when theyre traveling, says Cheung. This will definitely help them to do their work when theyre on the road. They can either use a notebook computer with Office Outlook 2007 SP2 or they can use Microsoft Outlook Web App to retrieve more messages in their mailboxes. Mailbox performance will be the measure of success for Exchange Server 2010, says Cheung. With Exchange Server 2007 SP2, the performance of Office Outlook 2007 SP2 is quite good when the mailbox size is 1 GB. We hope to get good performance with Exchange Server 2010 after we expand the user mailbox size to 25 GB. If we do, then we will be very happy.

Improved Availability and Disaster Recovery

For the IT staff at Li & Fung, the new high-availability architecture of Exchange Server 2010 is a notable improvement that will help it strengthen its disaster recovery plan and recover from failures more quickly. Using a Database Availability Group, which supports up to 16 replicated database copies, Exchange Server 2010 can automatically switch between database copies to maintain availability when failures occur. That means the IT staff will no longer need to manually fail over from active to passive cluster nodes. With automatic failover and the improved high availability that replicated database copies provide, Database Availability Groups are a significant new feature of Exchange Server 2010, says Cheung. From the technical point of view, we definitely expect it to improve our e-mail system availability.

Increased Storage Utilization and Lower Costs

Li & Fung expects to lower future storage costs with Exchange Server 2010. As the softwares I/O requirements decrease, the company will be able to use fewer disks in an array and still increase the size of user mailboxes without degrading performance. With the storage improvements in Exchange Server 2010, we can use fewer disks with higher capacity to support the same amount of users, says Cheung. For example, with Exchange Server 2007 SP2, we are currently using five disks to host 750 users. With Exchange Server

2010, we will use fewer disks to support the same amount of users, or we will use the same number of disks to support more users; either way, we are saving. For future storage purchases, Li & Fung can now use SATA disks. Although reducing costs is not our primary objective, SATA disks are half the price of Fibre Channel disks, so we can cut our future fixed storage costs in half.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com For more information about Li & Fung Limited, call (852) 2300 2300 or visit the Web site at: www.lifung.com

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange Server 2010 delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, which combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available. For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, go to: www.microsoft.com/exchange For more information about Microsoft unified communications, go to: www.microsoft.com/uc
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published November 2009

From traditional export trading to global supply chain management, the Group has a proud heritage since 1906. It is a multinational group of companies driving strong growth in three distinct core businesses export sourcing through Li & Fung Limited, distribution through IDS and retailing through CRA and other non-listed entities. Li & Fung Limited has more than 95 years of history and is operating in 40 countries with 12,000 staffs worldwide. The core competency of Li & Fung Limited Licensing is developing brand values. Current brands include Ted Baker, Roots and Billabong. By firmly believing in each of the brands represented and upholding their origin, heritage, culture and legacy in a consistent and accurate manner, the brand values are communicated and conveyed to international consumers. It currently operates its retail business in two countries Hong Kong and Thailand with six retail points in prime locations.

The Challenge
Li & Fung Limited planned to open new stores for 3 brands in late 2006. The challenge is the business processes among the brands were not standardized. The processes like purchase ordering, receiving, product management, sales operations and item costing are all new and needs development. To quickly establish the best business practice for a newly formed retail management team, Li & Fung Limited demanded for a qualified retail technology partner who: possesses the international project management experience for apparel retailing in Asia Pacific understands international retail best practice and help their management team building the best retail blueprint promptly offers the qualitative international retail management software with standard functions and features meeting the needs of marketing, sales operations, logistics, finance and IT is capable of commissioning the new system within a tight rollout timeline

The Goal
to standardize back-office business processes among 3 new brands to deploy the POS system for new stores within a tight rollout schedule to centralize the IT support of retail management system in Hong Kong whilst enabling remote support to Thailand to accurately calculate and display stock quantity, average cost and gross margin of a single version of truth at real-time

Li & Fung
Case Study - Li & Fung
www.rinpak.com

The Solution
The following modules were implemented by Li & Fung Limited: Xpert-Merchandiser for back-office operations Xpert-Store for POS operations Xpert-ComLink for mass data import Xpert-Access for management reporting

The Result

 All three brands have successfully launched their new retail business using Xpert Series Software They have quickly established a standardized retail blueprint within a short period of time They have successfully automated the purchase ordering, inventory management, pricing, merchandise management, costing, marketing and management reporting all at once

Quote from Client

With Xpert Series Software, we have better control of our inventory movement, profit margins, marketing campaigns and sales operations across the brands based on a standardized retail blueprint. Thank to Rinpak project delivery team, we have successfully deployed our retail blueprint and streamlined our back-office and front-store business processes in a very short period of time. -Jeremy Tang, Business Development Director, Li & Fung Limited.