In today’s world, email is an indispensable communications tool that almost no organization can do without. Whether it is an email thread between employees, a complaint from a customer, a product launch announcement, or a confidential email, corporate email is a business record which needs to be protected. Not only are these emails the lifeblood of the organization but at some point they could be requested for legal or compliance reasons. In some cases, organizations have to retain email for a number of years placing additional burdens on their email infrastructure. This is why a growing number of organizations are investing in an email archiving solution – saving a copy of every email without affecting the message storage on the email server.
The problem with storage
Storage is typically the most significant limiting factor of an Exchange infrastructure. Using the recommendations and sizing tools from Microsoft, you can usually build out your initial infrastructure with sufficient processing power and RAM to scale to meet your users’ needs. Unless a user’s role in an organization changes, the CPU and RAM needed to service their email requests will remain fairly steady.
Storage is another story altogether. Administrators set mailbox storage quotas which need to be followed by employees. This means that users need to either delete emails or store them somewhere else. As an Exchange implementation matures, and as the users begin to collect messages and attachments, the size of the message store’s databases grows. Whether you are trying to back up a database, restore it, index it, or move it, the larger the database becomes, the greater an impact on performance it has. One of the easiest ways to boost performance of an existing Exchange infrastructure is to implement an email archiving solution. While having access to older emails, and eliminating storage limits are things users will appreciate, it is the reduction in the size of the Exchange store that provides the biggest benefit to all users of the system.
The larger a mailbox or public folder database becomes, the more resources it consumes on an Exchange system. Disk space is the most obvious of these resources, though it is not the only type. Whether you are using direct attached storage or SAN space, the disk space allocated to holding message stores is typically tier one storage; the fastest and most expensive of the available storage. And while this space could be expanded, it costs time and money, and is usually not the first choice when facing capacity limits. Backup space (typically tape) is the other type alluded to above. Backing up the message store database(s) is a critical part of your disaster recovery and business continuity planning, even when database availability groups are deployed. A DAG ensures that a mailbox database is online and available to users; it does not ensure that accidental deletions of critical messages do not happen. The larger a message store becomes, the longer it will take to backup and restore, and the more space it will require on whatever backup media you use.
The solution: Email archiving
Moving older messages from a user’s mailbox to a central store as part of an email archiving solution maintains access to all messages, ensures that they can be searched and reviewed in no time, and helps to optimize Exchange performance by keeping only recent messages within the message store. This in turn reduces the size of the message store. Smaller message stores require less tier one disk space to hold, can be backed up (and in the event of an emergency, restored) more quickly, and are faster to search or index. This improves the overall performance of the Exchange system by keeping message stores’ size at a more manageable level.
Adding a third-party email archiving solution to your Exchange infrastructure boosts Exchange performance by offloading the archiving workload, reducing the size of the message store, and as a result, reducing the amount of disk space used by Exchange. It also helps improve system performance by reducing the size and time required to perform backups and restores. What comes built-in to Exchange does provide functionality, but consumes more RAM and CPU on the Exchange server. Offloading archiving to a third-party email archiving solution reduces these loads on the Exchange server.
Email archiving is a sound investment for any organization which wants to save all its email records, while maintaining the right email quota for the message store to run smoothly and to keep users happy.
This guest post was provided by Ed Fisher on behalf of GFI Software. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. More information: GFI email archiving.
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