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Taking Control With Archiving |
Though some say e-discovery is the chief driver of archiving system adoption, there are many reasons to use the technology, such as freeing up storage space, improving system performance and providing for disaster recovery.
At the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, CIO George Yacoub has to contend with the ever-growing volume of email in a Microsoft Exchange environment. "We have a lot of researchers who do most of their correspondence via email," Yacoub says. "The pressing issue for us is that users are running out of disk space." He recently deployed an archiving system from EMC Corp. to help manage storage and prevent the hospital's 1,700 end users from pushing inbox capacity -- currently 250MB -- to the limit.
Large data stores further increase the time to perform maintenance, backup and recovery. Stripping email attachments out of messages and storing them in an archive can reduce data store size by as much as 80%, says Paul D'Arcy, vice president of worldwide marketing at email management vendor MessageOne Inc. That can further improve the user experience by decreasing the amount of time it takes to open an attachment.
For Cardinal Logistics Management Corp., a privately held trucking company based in Concord, N.C., a new archiving server from CommVault allows the company's 1,000 employees to access archived messages relatively quickly, which is the primary goal. The server integrates with the company's backup system and transfers email to an off-site disaster recovery system after six months; after a year, messages are moved to tape. Moving email messages out of the production environment means users aren't bogged down searching for messages on a 300-gigabyte database anymore; now it takes no more than a minute to retrieve a message, says network engineer Marty Hurd.
Email archiving systems can further serve as a disaster recovery system, resulting in cost savings. "Using an archiving system for disaster recovery eliminates the need for a replicated environment, which is expensive and hard to manage," says D'Arcy. "You don't have to store an email in three places -- the primary environment, archive and disaster recovery system -- so you can cut your costs by one-third."
--M.S.
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No Heavy Lifting
E-discovery is the No. 1 driver for companies' adoption of email archiving systems, according to Paul D'Arcy, vice president of worldwide marketing for MessageOne Inc., a provider of business continuity and email management systems based in Austin, Texas. (For others, see "Taking Control With Archiving," at right.) According to research firm IDC, the global market for email archiving applications topped $470 million in 2006 and will exceed $1 billion by 2010. In a 2006 survey of 450 IT and storage professionals sponsored by online archiving provider PowerFile Inc., 80% of respondents are considering some kind of archiving system as part of their overall storage plan.
"It's very expensive and time-consuming for people to find the relevant emails in their environment," says D'Arcy. A typical midmarket organization likely has email stored on tape, in local archives and in personal folders. During litigation, the ability to know what messages exist and where to locate them is critical because that information has to be made available to opposing counsel early in the discovery process.
Email archiving systems work in part by automating when messages and attachments are moved from production email servers to storage media, a function called "retention management." That puts an end to the need for employees to be "junior records managers" charged with choosing which of their email messages will get sent to the archives, says Andy Cohen, associate general counsel at storage vendor EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Mass. "Even midmarket companies have millions of emails, and employees can't make retention decisions in a consistent manner," he says.
Gregg Davis, senior VP and CIO of the $1.2-billion construction company Webcor Builders Inc., agrees. In 2001, Webcor deployed an archiving system from Veritas Software (now Symantec Corp.) that archives email based on the date of the message. Mail automatically moves from public folders to the archives in 30 days and then moves from personal inboxes to the archives in 90 days. After two years, email moves from the archives to optical disk and tape. "We wanted a system that didn't require end users to do anything," he says. "If you ask them to move or flag messages, it's not going to work."
Email archiving systems also offer indexing technology. An administrator can set up rules for incoming messages that archiving software then classifies as needing to be archived or not so that your email archive doesn't become unmanageable. "The whole point of archiving should be to keep messages so that they are easily accessible," says Julie Gable, president of Gable Consulting LLC, a Wyndmoor, Pa., firm that specializes in electronic records and compliance.
And most experts recommend choosing policy-based software to facilitate the retention, storage and deletion of large volumes of email; IT can quickly set parameters based on users, content or department. Consistent use of such methods protects the organization in the event of a lawsuit, while searching, indexing and auditing functions enable it to locate information if necessary.
Gartner's 2006 Magic Quadrant on active email archiving contains 14 vendors, including such stalwarts as CA, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM (with its FileNet acquisition) and Symantec. Varying widely, pricing is based largely on the capabilities required as well as an organization's existing IT infrastructure and staff. For the hosted model, costs vary based on the number of seats, the volume of archived messages and the level of services.
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