File and Email Archiving

Backup Technology Can Help You Manage Your Data Lifecycle

Backup Technology is a world leader in providing fast, efficient and cost effective Email and File archiving

Managing the lifecycle and growth of data is a difficult task Backup Technology fully understands. This understanding and experience has enabled them to offer tailored file and email archiving solutions to eliminate the headache

Why archive?

The cost of maintaining a highly reliable and highly available file or mail infrastructure can be huge – and as data grows this cost can increase dramatically. In most instances, the cost of the system is justified by the requirement that users are able to access the files or emails they need immediately, when and as they require them. However, due to regulatory compliance requirements, data can in most cases end up being kept longer than the users themselves require it, especially in the case of emails, yet the cost of storing this data and keeping it on highly available hardware remains. Not only is there cost factor, but especially in the case of email servers, as more data is added to the system, the performance begins to decrease significantly.
In some email systems administrators limit the size of users’ mailboxes. However, in the majority of cases this simply means the user will export their old emails to an archive themselves in the form of a PST file. These files can then cause issues with a user’s workstation running out of disk space, or even issues on file servers if users begin to place them there. One of the benefits of Backup Technology’s email archiving solution is it allows these PST files to be completely reintegrated with the email archive and removed (or left if required) from the file servers, freeing up expensive disk space on the servers.

Tiered storage

The solution to ever increasing costs of storing data on highly available systems is to introduce tiered storage. Files or emails that reach a certain age or have a long period of inactivity can moved ‘down a tier’ to less expensive hardware, to bring in line the hardware costs with the importance of that data. The removal of this data from the highest tier will then allow room for newer data and remove the performance impact caused by the older data – removing the need to continually add expensive storage to an already expensive system. Users will be able to access their day-to-day work data on the highest tier storage, and when they require less important information, they are able to retrieve this from a lower tier. For file servers this could be one or more different shares called ‘Archive’; and for email servers, a folder called ‘Archive’ alongside their Inbox; and in both cases, the structure of that data would be exactly the same as it was on the highest tier’s storage.
However, the are some cases where users might still need to access the data archived onto lower tiers from the same location as their day-to-day data – and this is where stubbing gets involved.

Stubbing

Stubbing is the process of moving a file (or email) to a lower tier storage location, but leaving behind a very small ‘stub’. Users can still access the original data through the stub simply by opening it, and as far as the user is concerned, the stub is the original data – even the size of the original data is reported although the stub is merely bytes of data.
This process works by redirecting the request for data to the lower tiered storage locations as opposed to it reached the higher tiered location where the stub is actually stored.
Although using stubs can mitigate the performance benefits of moving data to lesser storage tiers because of the small file it leaves behind, it still gives huge cost savings due to the reduction in data size while being completely transparent to the end users.

Our Solutions

Email archiving

• Completely agentless solution – the archive takes a complete copy of your live Exchange and archives all items within it including email messages, contacts, appointments, tasks and notes. After the initial copy it simply takes copies of log files from the Exchange server to keeps its own full copy up to date.
• Disaster Recovery capability – because the solution takes a complete copy of your live Exchange and keeps it continuously up to date, it acts as a Continuous Data Protection backup of your live Exchange. If you lose your Exchange databases due to a hardware failure or other reason, you can recover your exchange data from the archive directly back into your Exchange, almost from the minute before the failure, at full LAN speeds. In addition, individual mailbox stores, mailboxes and email messages can also be recovered from the archive.
• Reduce the size of users’ mailboxes automatically – mitigating the need for PST files which can use up valuable disk space on file servers or clutter a user’s workstation.
• Automatically ingest emails that users have already exported to PST files into the new email archive. Intelligent heuristic checks are performed on the contents to accurately ascertain the owner of the PST file, and automatically make the contents of that file available to the user in their Outlook and Outlook Web Access.
• Integrated and seamless ‘Self-Service’ access to the archive from within Outlook and even Outlook Web Access – users simply click their ‘Archive’ folder and see a complete view of their inbox including all emails they have ever received, including those still residing on the Exchange server. These emails are fully indexed and searchable and can even be forwarded or replied to from within the archive itself.
• The ability to stub attachments from emails based on age and/or size of attachments – in most instances the size of an Exchange database is hugely down to large attachments as emails in general are very small text files. Email matching a given criteria can have their attachments removed from the Exchange and placed within the archive. Simply opening the stubbed email within Outlook or Outlook Web Access will automatically retrieve the attachments so the user still has full access to the attachments, while still freeing up valuable space on the Exchange storage.
• Full eDiscovery – auditors can perform extremely complex searches on all emails within the archive (including those still residing on the Exchange server) and have the ability to view full email threads (including replies and forwards) where required.
• Highly configurable retention policies – you can configure a global rule to keep emails in the archive for a fixed number of years, or you could specify that if the email was stored in a folder containing the string, “Keep Forever”, the email will be kept forever.
• All policies, including self-service access policies, retention policies and stubbing policies, can be applied to entire exchange servers, individual mailbox stores, specific mailboxes, and even Active Directory users and Active Directory groups.
• Can be purchased as a service or a solution.

File Archiving

• Completely agentless solution – no applications need to be installed on the file server to perform the archiving.
• Reduce the data size stored on file servers – files are moved to lower tiered storage where users can access them from the same directory structure as on the main file server.
• Stubbing – if moving the files to another location is not acceptable, stubs can be created on the main file server that allows users to access the files completely seamlessly as if they were a normal file. Unlike with other solutions, the file is not restored to the main file server when opened. If users change stubbed files, the new file can optionally be recovered to the main server and the stub removed – or the new file can be written directly back to the archive, removing the need to recover the file to the file server first.
• Full eDiscovery – auditors can perform extremely complex searches on all files within the archive. A huge amount of file types are supported, including all Microsoft Office and OpenOffice documents, PDF files and text files. eDiscovery can be integrated with that for emails allowing files as well as emails to be searched at the same time.
• Can be purchased as a service or a solution.