This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about email archiving.

Thursday, 05 January 2012 15:16

If there’s one thing an Exchange admin is used to doing, it’s monitoring disk utilization on their mailbox servers. Users hoard email like gold, and as mailbox databases increase in size, backups take longer, restores can exceed recovery time objectives (RTO), and servers can run out of disk space. Admins might look to quotas to reign in runaway mailbox sizes, but those that implement quotas soon find that all this does is force users to move email to PST files, which brings a whole new crop of problems. Performance problems, corrupt files, and data loss all pop up, all that email is still consuming disk space; they’ve simply shifted the load from the mailbox servers to the fileservers. Fortunately, there’s a better answer to the problem of email storage. Email archiving can solve all of these issues without introducing any of the problems associated with other ways to manage email storage. By bolting on email archiving to an existing Exchange infrastructure, users can continue hoarding email, database sizes can remain manageable, and admins can focus on more important issues. Let’s look at three of the best reasons why you need email archiving.

1. Unlimited mailbox sizes

We may as well get the users’ concerns out of the way first, as they are the most direct cause of problems associated with all that email. Email archiving provides users with another place to store all the email they want to keep. This other place is simply made up of less expensive disk space than what your Exchange mailbox servers use. It remains available to your users in Outlook. It can be searched. Users can move email into and out of the archive manually or using rules. You can set up automatic archiving that moves mail based on subject, date, etc., to the archive. The email remains available to the user. This is not the same as archiving email in a PST. Email archiving is server side technology and has none of the problems of PSTs. There’s no risk of data loss that comes with storing PSTs on the local hard disk; there’s no performance hit or data corruption risks from storing PSTs on network shares either. This is a 100% server-based, centrally managed solution.

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