Arsenal FC emails get 'bouncebackability'

Arsenal football club has protected itself against costly email problems, which could in extreme cases jeopardise player transfers, by rolling out archive and restore software from CA.

The Mail Manager product will allow for the quick restoration of messages in the event of a crash and also ensures that all mailboxes are auto-archived.

The technology was bought nine months ago but the club has waited until it completed its move into the new £263m Emirates Stadium to roll out the software.

Paul Farmer, head of IT at Arsenal, told silicon.com that email is an indispensable part of the club's business, touching every area of its commercial interests – from match day programmes to hospitality planning to player transfers.

silicon.com Retail & Leisure

Get the latest retail and leisure news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the R&L newsletter today!

"It's hard to imagine any business where email is not a vital part of the business and Arsenal is no different," he said.

"In the run up to a match all the programme proofs go over email and if we're buying a player a lot of that may be conducted over email."

Farmer said the competition across Europe for top players and the timeliness of transfer negotiations means any communications failure must be avoided.

The match day programme proofs are another example of an area where more strategic planning was required. Because of the need for high-resolution images many mailboxes were over 4GB in size, Farmer told silicon.com.

The automated archiving element of the service is intended to pick up the shortfall which results from user behaviour, said Farmer.

"Users are meant to archive their old emails and move them off the servers but users are users," he said of the tendency towards operator error.

All emails are still visible, as the system takes a snapshot of the email which users can see – a process known as 'stubbing'. However, emails more than one or two years old will be archived on separate servers.

Mailboxes can also be restored quickly – something which Farmer says was never the case in the past.

The value of the Mail Manager deal has not been disclosed, however it is part of a far larger relationship between CA and Arsenal, who also use Unicenter and Brightstor products from the software giant for network and storage management. In return CA has invested £54,000 in club-level seating in the Emirates Stadium over three seasons.