* Two products that address key messaging management problems
A recent Osterman Research survey found that two of the top five problems in messaging management are viruses (and related threats) and the growth in messaging storage requirements. Both were cited as serious or very serious problems by more than half of the organizations polled.
To help manage growth in e-mail storage, at least for Microsoft Exchange environments, Lucid8 offers a product called GoExchange. This is an automated maintenance tool for Exchange databases that optimizes and repairs corrupted Exchange databases, making Exchange much more reliable.
One of its key benefits is that it defragments these databases to recover a significant amount of storage on Exchange servers. A GoExchange customer recently told me that their e-mail storage had grown from about 25G bytes in 2000 to 400G bytes in 2004. After installing GoExchange, their storage requirement a year later was still 400G bytes, indicating that they had saved approximately 100G bytes of space compared to what their requirement would have been without the product. For slower-growing data stores, there can be actual reductions in storage on the order of 25%.
To help resolve problems with viruses, worms and related problems, Avinti offers its iSolation Server. This server runs e-mail attachments in a virtual machine at the perimeter of a network to test these attachments for suspicious behavior. Any suspect messages are then quarantined so that they can be cleaned of threats after a signature is available. Avinti claims that the product was completely effective at stopping new variants of MyDoom, Bagle and Netsky before signatures had been developed for them.
The products discussed here are certainly not the only products of their type, but two good examples of what e-mail administrators can deploy to resolve two of the most serious problems in messaging today. In the interest of full disclosure, neither Lucid8 nor Avinti is a client of Osterman Research.
