E-mail archiving: a special case

Small, dispersed offices aren’t alone in demanding special backup treatment. Mail servers in organizations large and small need practical, efficient solutions that simplify archiving and retrieving e-mail from cumbersome Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino mail stores.

The myth is that solutions such as EMC EmailXtender, iLumin Assentor Enterprise, or Symantec/Veritas Enterprise Vault -- or hosted services offered by the likes of NaviSite, Sentinare, and Zantaz -- need only be implemented by financial trading firms. In truth, any company with an e-mail server or two should consider an e-mail archiving system, thanks to the increasing popularity of electronic discovery requests during lawsuits. For example, judges have ordered companies to present every e-mail between two parties in the past five years -- and in one case, all messages sent to customers containing the words “promise and guarantee” or the phrase “I swear.”

The problem with such requests is that they’re not impossible. All you have to do is restore every full and incremental backup of Exchange for the past five years, search for the appropriate phrases, drag and drop the messages into a folder, and then export that folder into a PST file. The judge doesn’t care how much this costs you or how long it takes -- just do it.

If you had an e-mail archiving system, you would simply run the search that the judges ask for, and it would automatically create the appropriate export file for you. Something that would have taken months of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars now takes five minutes and costs nothing.

Also consider the problem of large e-mail servers and multiple e-mail servers. At some point, almost every company feels its Exchange server contains too much “old data” and implements e-mail quotas. All quotas do, though, is create other problems. Users still want access to old e-mail, so they create an offline archive; the biggest disk hogs often store that offline archive on the file server because they still want it backed up.

This storage method actually exacerbates the problem it was meant to solve because offline archives can’t provide the single-instance store features that e-mail servers can. Instead, the 50MB attachment you wanted deleted from the e-mail server now resides on 10 users’ offline archives -- which may actually be stored on the file server. Another pitfall: Nonsavvy users sometimes accidentally create an offline archive of important e-mail on a laptop, resulting in important intellectual property not being backed up at all.

E-mail archiving systems solve the space problem by pulling out old e-mails, large attachments, and redundant messages among multiple e-mail servers, storing them instead in an instantly accessible location. The e-mails and attachments appear to still be in the e-mail server, but they are actually stored somewhere else. This speeds up e-mail server backups and restores, saves space, and eliminates redundancy across the environment, often bringing tremendous ROI to the IT department as soon as the e-mail archiving system is implemented.