Momentum builds around archiving appliances

Interest in archiving e-mail and instant-messaging content is gaining steam with recent announcements of new archiving appliances.

For example, last week Intradyn announced its ComplianceVault06 archiving appliance, aimed at midsized and large organizations. The new release offers much larger storage capacities than the models Intradyn announced last year – the current release will store up to 8T bytes of content on disk, although data can also be stored on optical media or tape. ComplianceVault06 works with most e-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino. Earlier this year, Intradyn began marketing its archiving products with Sony Electronics.

Another archiving appliance vendor, this one focused on smaller organizations, is a relatively new company called WaLa Systems – the company’s name comes from the fact that it is based in both Washington State and Louisiana. The company’s Defender product is an archiving appliance that provides up 2T bytes of RAID-5 storage, upgradeable to 8T bytes. Defender also includes a complete back-up e-mail server that supports SMTP, POP3, IMAP and HTTP.

While many organizations are resistant to the notion of archiving, preferring instead to purge all e-mail on a regular basis, new developments in archiving make it relatively easy to implement archiving products that will support any or all of the several reasons that organizations might want to consider archiving: compliance, legal discovery, storage management, knowledge management, migration and so forth.

Speaking of purging e-mail on a regular basis vs. archiving it, Osterman Research will be hosting a Webinar on Thursday, Nov. 30 at noon Eastern Time that specifically addresses this issue. We will be having a debate with a representative from Symantec, offering a point/counterpoint approach to the whole notion of purging e-mail on a regular basis or archiving it on a long-term basis. We look forward to your attendance at this complimentary Webinar – you can sign up by visiting our Web site and clicking on the button you’ll find on the home page.