The increase in e-mail volume is creating significant management challenges and guaranteeing uptime in addition to ensuring backup and recovery have become major IT challenges for administrators on a global scale.
Companies are turning to e-mail archiving to address these challenges while reducing the cost of e-mail storage. Mark Edwards, director: products and services at Intuate Group, says moving e-mail to archival systems offloads primary e-mail servers for improved performance and manageability without sacrificing data accessibility.
"Even companies that already have an e-mail archiving solution in place have realised that growing requirements for e-discovery, litigation support and regulatory compliance are enough to intimidate even the most seasoned IT veteran," he says.
"Archives must remain online for longer time spans and users must be able to search them effectively at a moment`s notice and most corporate e-mail needs to be verifiably unaltered for longer periods as well. To meet these challenges, we suggest the deployment of an integrated hardware and software solution that is capable of satisfying all e-mail archival needs across the enterprise."
In summary, says Edwards, with compliance requirements now impacting nearly every organisation, and with ignorance of compliance requirements leading to steep fines and legal action, businesses face an increased demand to retain more data, for longer periods of time, and to be able to retrieve it more quickly, more accurately and more frequently.
"At the same time, data archiving has also been driven by economics, freeing up primary storage system capacity to handle `organise` growth of product data," he says. "Moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers enables a better balance between investments and capability while reducing incremental growth in the most expensive and robust storage tiers."
Edwards says it is vital that customers understand the impact and benefits of their chosen storage solution. He says that easy to manage e-mail archive storage mitigates IT involvement by including and configuring capability through scalable, proficient systems that can de-duplicate content.
"Highly available e-mail archive storage allows employees to consistently access messages as needed thanks to storage systems that offer integrated data protection features that can be optimised for various content types.
"Over the life of the e-mail archive, it is also imperative that costs - both capital and operational - are controlled. With archives supporting lengthy legal processes and management initiatives, storage costs must be measured over a long period of time and, as such, investing in solutions that make it easier for businesses to store data in accordance to its access and availability requirements is critical.
"Without considering these issues, e-mail archive application deployments may lead to even more operational headaches and unplanned costs."
E-mail usage is unlikely to decrease and it is evident that message content has become vital to the productivity of any businesses. IT is now tasked with finding ways to store e-mail more effectively and efficiently.
The first step, says Edwards, is to deploy e-mail archive software. IT must then decide which storage to use in support of the archive and this, he says, is where NetApp begins to show its strengths.
"Overall, the NetApp unified system architecture provides the manageability, performance, flexibility and availability that is necessary to run an e-mail archive environment under today`s increasingly complex business demands," he concludes. "Regardless of the evaluation criteria, customers should elevate the importance of storage within an e-mail archive and consider NetApp to accelerate the benefits of storage and managing e-mail more effectively."
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