Archiving101.com

This question has come up to me many times in the past 2 years and actually there is a lot to think about.  While support for Exchange 5.5 has ended quite some time ago, there are still lots of companies relying on Exchange 5.5 on a daily basis.  After all .. fundementally there wasn’t anything wrong with Exchange 5.5 if you simply used it as a mail and calendar server.

If a software vendor decides to support another platform, it actually adds significant amount of QC time for each release. In some cases this could easily add 10-20% extra time to the QC timeframe adding weeks if not months until a release is available.  And this all for <5% of the market and generally for a market that didn’t decide to spend money on software and hardware even when the product actually got EOLed.  It is my opinion though that the valuable QC and development time could be invested in other features then Exchange 5.5.

For those that don’t know .. Exchange 5.5 actually never had Journaling as a base feature.  It got added at a much later stage in its life and one had to go to ‘raw mode’ to hack in the functionality.

I’m not going to discuss the whole reasoning why former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer had to resign, however the archiving industry basically owes its massive growth largely to him. We should all remember Mr. Spitzer’s contribution to the email archiving industry as during his eight year tenure as Attorney General, Mr. Spitzer took on the giants of Wall Street - Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and the New York Stock Exchange in cases involving white collar crime, securities crime and internet fraud. Along the way much was said about the mis-management of email records, resulting in many judicial changes to management of email and all forms of electronic records.

Time will tell if Eliott Spitzer resumes a public career or retires to a more private life, but we owe a debt of gratitude for the man who almost single handedly brought attention to email and other forms of electronic communication and brought about the changes we take for granted today.

Store Management, Stubbing, Archiving, Mailbox Extension … this feature has many names and each archiving vendor has their own claim to fame on this.   The principle is easy… you take a message that is in an email database… and replace it with a shortcut to the archived item.  The idea behind this is that the end user can still open up the older larger messages in his mailbox while the mail administrator gets the most bang for the buck on his store and reduces backup/recovery time.  Sounds good right?   This principle is what archiving systems are building on … this is the one principle that made these product rise to great heights and created the marketing buzz. 

 Well… in my opinion this whole feature set has reached its maximum life expectancy and its time to kill it. To prove my point I’d like to go back in history.  In the mid 90s people were using Exchange Server 5.5 (a good mail server for its time), 9Gb hard disk were awesome, 16Gb mail stores maximum, tape backup and a 5-10Mb mailbox limit.  With those limitations it is perfectly understandable that organizations would like to squeeze out the last byte out of their storage capacity.  In 2007 I can go to CompUSA and buy a 1.5TB NAS drive for about 400 US dollars, Exchange 2007 is available in 64Bit, backups are done to disk and people have mailboxes that are over 100Mb.  I’ve seen archiving vendors products stub 2kb messages with a 4-6kb shortcut and therefore actually increasing storage needs.  Stubbing also takes a hit on your I/O and CPU plus it contributes to database fragmentation.   I understand that vendors might cling on to stubbing out of sentimental value, but it truly doesn’t offer the benefits anymore that existed in the early days.

Here is my take on this:Organizations could greatly benefit from much easier policies:

• Take a copy of the messages that are in the database and that are send and received… store them in an archiving server with appropriate policies

• Leave only 6 months of messages in the Exchange Stores

• If you really want to gain storage… stub only the attachments… leave message bodies alone

 There you go… no need for cleaning up stubs, I/O hit .. It’s easy for end users to understand where their data is, less helpdesk calls to find data that could be in either location.   

This is the first post on archiving101.com.  I’ve pondered quite a long time to create a blog about an industry that has been hyped up so much over the recent years.  While there are many blogs or websites that focus on related technologies, none actually touch the core of archiving software.  My goal is to write no-nonsense about archiving products and its related technologies, write on futures that I’m expecting to happen and related technologies. I’ve worked for many years now in the archiving industry and have seen many companies come and go and many ideas come and go.  The email archiving industry started to raise its head in the mid to late 90s with companies like OTG, iLumin, EAS, KVS and IXOS.  Many of these names might no longer sound familiar as all of them have gone through one or more then one acquisition.  OTG (known for its EmailXtender product) was acquired by Legato in 2002 for 403M USD, while Legato was acquired by EMC not much later.  Similar fates happened to iLumin (now CA), EAS, (acquired by Zantaz and in recently by Autonomy), KVS (later VERITAS, then Symantec) and IXOS who was picked up by OpenText.  All in all an industry that has seen a lot of activity and seeing the market predictions that the analysts are providing hasn’t seen the last of this.  Over the next few weeks I’ll go deeper in on the history of archiving systems.