I'm proud to author my first post for On Storage. We'll be posting here on a monthly basis to share stories from our customers, industry data and updates on what's going on at Neverfail. I'll begin with a customer story about the importance of email reliability.

Although I was aware that summer was primetime for house moves and people preparing for new schools and colleges, I hadn't appreciated the importance of this for retail companies. As summer arrives one of our customers, mattress discounters, experiences its own version of "Christmas" between Memorial Day and Labor Day. They experience a massive upswing in demand, with the busiest days falling on the major holiday weekends. The company is spread across the Northeastern U.S., with more than 100 retail locations in five markets and it relies on email for daily operations.

Executives at the company have zero tolerance for downtime, not surprisingly because of the dependency on email. With holiday weekends being so important, the pressure on IT staff to keep systems running automatically, without manual intervention, is immense. As a result, the company worked with Neverfail to implement a continuous availability and disaster recovery solution for its Microsoft Exchange system. The Neverfail solution was put to the test when Mattress Discounters experienced a primary email server crash as a result of some planned maintenance. When the problem struck, the secondary server kicked in and users remained completely unaware of the situation. The business kept right on humming. To read more about Mattress Discounters' use of Neverfail, read the complete case study. You can also check out our Neverfail demo.

-Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail