Companies today are not taking email storage as seriously as they should. The legal implications of long-term storage combined with the email explosion, are issues that need to be addressed. Non-IT staff often expect immediate solutions and IT administrators are forced into quick fix remedies. Strategies such as capping file sizes and deleting emails are just fire-fighting and often conflict with legal requirements.
According to the IDC the number of email addresses in use will double from 505 million in 2000 to 1.2 billion by 2005. With such a rapid growth in email it is important to develop a strategy to keep this mountain of data under control. The results of recent research carried out highlight the fact that email management is only addressed when it becomes a problem and so email storage solutions are often knee-jerk reactions. The survey’s findings also confirmed that many IT administrators are using extreme policies such as capping both email servers and network servers in order to deal with massive storage requirements.
The Cryoserver architecture supports storage management features with the ‘mailbox management’ or stubbing facility. Companies, if they choose to, can eliminate the need for quotas and message size restrictions and give users a mailbox of virtually unlimited size while also controlling message store growth. Exchange store management significantly reduces the size of Microsoft Exchange stores, further reducing e-mail storage by as much as 80 per cent . Furthermore Administrators can significantly reduce the time spent dealing with mailbox housekeeping. Combined with other features of the Cryoserver solution, the need for Exchange Server backup operations is significantly reduced (and can be eliminated).
Automated policies on the Exchange server replace each email message with a small kilobyte stub (referrer) which points to the email in the Cryoserver repository instead. This gives immediate benefits back to an organisation, as less expensive primary disk is utilized on the Exchange server, an application server. Reduction in storage volumes being used gives a boost in performance to Exchange and resulting in end user productivity. Original emails are replaced, for example a 10MB email can be replaced by a 5kb stub in user’s mailboxes which opens the email from the Cryoserver repository instead. To the end user it is a transparent process and they would not even know that the mail is not being viewed from Exchange.
This policy can be based on date, size of email or mailbox name You can even have emails arrive in users Outlook mailboxes already stubbed, stubbing in real time, which can lead to multiple benefits including but not limited to less bandwidth utilised; even remote workers synchronizing with Exchange server can be faster. All of this is transparent to the end user.