* E-mail retention
The issue of managing our day-to-day e-mail has popped up several times in this column of late, and it is likely to continue to do so until the vendors provide us with some good alternatives to the rather thin tool kits that accompany commercial e-mail programs. I expect to keep karping on this one for a while – after all, several vendors have cleared their throats and are at present busily trying to convince me that they alone now offer the best e-mail solution since the discovery of the electron.
I’ll try to report on anything I see that is worthwhile.
There are already lots of solutions out there, of course. EMC’s answer for what it refers to as “short-term retention” is an online solution consisting of a bundled Clariion CX (SATA drives) and the company’s EmailXtender Archive Edition (which it picked up from Legato, which got it with its acquisition of OTG Software). For long-term storage – archiving that helps to address compliance issues – the company recommends its Centera box, which is its standard platform for content addressable storage (CAS). In this case, the Centera comes bundled with two software packages, EmailXtender and DiskXtender.
HP offers a device that competes with Centera, the Reference Information Storage System (better known as RISS). The RISS was originally designed to focus on archiving e-mail and Microsoft Office documents, but is expanding to cover other applications as well. It offers automatic, transparent archiving of e-mails and their attachments.
Some may feel that the EMC and HP applications will be overkill for their needs. Although there is now evidence to show that this sort of “overkill” will actually provide many long-term savings, many will still choose a less expensive path. For them, one alternative is NearPoint from Mimosa Systems https://www.mimosasystems.com/html/prod_nearpoint.htm. NearPoint is a continuous data protection (CDP) product that captures data in the Exchange database, and then continually shadows all Exchange transactions, writing to both nearline disk storage for rapid recovery, and to a database that provides archiving, recovery and other services.
Quest software http://www.quest.com, offers a broad set of tools that should improve the experience of both admin and user. Quest’s answer to inadequate archiving, Archive Manager for Exchange, automatically moves data from mailboxes and local PST files to a central archive. Admins can then manage all e-mail data from a central location. The company also offers software for managing distribution lists, for e-mail problem detection, for individual message restoration, plus several other reporting and analysis tools.
In closing, I must remind you that if you are worried about compliance issues, archiving e-mail does not in any way ensure that you will meet data retention regulations. These typically require lots more than just archiving e-mails for a pre-defined retention period – for example, you will also have to address data retention regulations that require protecting content from change or deletion, which will mean that WORM (write once read many) technology will have to be part of the mix. If this sort of thing is a concern, you might want to consult the folks at GlassHouse, (http://www.glasshouse.com) which offers a vendor-neutral compliance analysis service.
There will be plenty more e-mail issues to discuss as the summer wears on.
