Email archiving solutions

What's everyone using for email archiving, and what do you think about it?

Symantec Enterprise Vault and Barracuda Message Archiver are at the top of my list to investigate at the moment. Any other solutions out there worth mentioning? And what are the opinions of the ones I mentioned?

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Comments

Claymoore

Take a look at Mimosa NearPoint (now owned by Iron Mountain). I have a few clients that use it and I have been impressed with it. In particular, I prefer how they use the Exchange transaction logs for archiving and tracking as opposed to how Symantec EV relies on Exchange journaling for archiving.

Email Archiving, SharePoint Archiving, File Archiving, eDiscovery | Mimosa Systems

it_consultant

Exchange Server 2010 SP1.

forkvoid

it_consultant wrote: »

Exchange Server 2010 SP1.

Wasn't aware it had archiving abilities. How does it stack up against the other solutions mentioned here?

Claymoore

Exchange 2010 has some good archive capabilities for keeping email around and searching for it, but to implement archiving for compliance purposes you will still need journaling on top of archiving. Archiving the mail will keep the message, but journaling will also keep the message tracking information, such as BCC recipients or distribution list members, that you will need for e-discovery compliance. Exchange 2010 archiving also requires an Enterprise CAL for the user and Outlook 2010 for client integration. The bits for integration with Outlook 2007 are in SP1, but you will have to wait for the next Office service pack to get the update for Outlook itself. Requiring an enterprise CAL and Outlook 2010 makes the Exchange 2010 'free' archiving feature less free.
Exchange Server 2010 Licensing

One of the reasons people archive email is to move old messages from first-tier, high-performance Exchange storage to cheaper, second-tier disks. Exchange 2010 also supports almost unlimited mailbox sizes and a large database will run fine on a single, local SATA spindle. You can leave the mail in the mailbox because it is already on the cheapest storage.

If all you want is to provide your users with a way to keep all their email, Exchange 2010 will give you what you need. If you are more interested in legal compliance, you should still look into some of the third party products.

it_consultant

You can archive based on Server based policies and you can prevent people from deleting items by using a litigation hold. For example, we have a default policy that runs every night that moves 2 year old messages from all mail folders into an archive store located on a SATA raid. This policy is set on the server and is actually fairly simple to set up. I suggest taking a look at it because it really simplifies things when you don't have to run Symantec or Sunbelt on top of your messaging solution.

It is true that you need enterprise CALs and Outlook 2010 (or use OWA) in order to utilize this feature. Remember, whatever other solution you use will have a per seat price too, so don't let the initial price tag of the premiums CALs deter you.

Chivalry1

We currently use EMC SourceOne. This solution is very robust and scaled for large enterprise environments. However warn management to get the check book out. Commvaults Simpana is a good product as well but deployment and implementation is a bit complex. There is a great medium enterprise solution that I have implemented that works great. MailArchiva - email archiving, email archiving software, ediscovery they have a free and enterprise edition. Both the free edition and enterprise edition work great.

Dont waste your time on the GFI MailArchiva; completely worthless. In fact all of GFI products are. So my order is as follows:

EMC SourceOne (Expensive - Enterprise)
Commvault Simpana (Less Expensive - Enterprise)
MailArchiva (Least Expensive - Enterprise & SMB)

joey74055

Has anyone used the redgate archiving product? If so, how well does this software work?
Exchange email archiving software, exchange archiving software – Exchange Server Archiver

arwes

We're in the process of implementing Sunbelt Vipre, and our sales guy sent me an email the other day advertising their Sunbelt Exchange Archiver for 50% off through the rest of this year.

Exchange Archiving - Email Archiving by Sunbelt Software

We're seriously thinking about implementing this, as we're an insurance agency and have to retain all our emails for at least 7 years in case of lawsuits. As it is now, we're keeping each year's emails as a separate Exchange store. Real fun tracking down a single email from 2008.

I've had really good results from their support people this week with a SQL issue we were having in trying to get the Vipre admin console working on my laptop.

RTmarc

Claymoore wrote: »

Exchange 2010 has some good archive capabilities for keeping email around and searching for it, but to implement archiving for compliance purposes you will still need journaling on top of archiving. Archiving the mail will keep the message, but journaling will also keep the message tracking information, such as BCC recipients or distribution list members, that you will need for e-discovery compliance. Exchange 2010 archiving also requires an Enterprise CAL for the user and Outlook 2010 for client integration. The bits for integration with Outlook 2007 are in SP1, but you will have to wait for the next Office service pack to get the update for Outlook itself. Requiring an enterprise CAL and Outlook 2010 makes the Exchange 2010 'free' archiving feature less free.
Exchange Server 2010 Licensing

One of the reasons people archive email is to move old messages from first-tier, high-performance Exchange storage to cheaper, second-tier disks. Exchange 2010 also supports almost unlimited mailbox sizes and a large database will run fine on a single, local SATA spindle. You can leave the mail in the mailbox because it is already on the cheapest storage.

If all you want is to provide your users with a way to keep all their email, Exchange 2010 will give you what you need. If you are more interested in legal compliance, you should still look into some of the third party products.

A couple of things to add / echo on this. Unless something has changed, the archive mailbox also requires a CAL which could effectively double the number of CALs you require if everyone gets an archive.

Also, the archive mailbox must be in the same database as the primary mailbox which restricts you from moving it to lower tiered storage. Which is inline with Microsoft's stance that it can run on low-end storage.

I can't say that I'm too impressed with the current archiving options. I would imagine that they'll be improved upon in the next release of Exchange.

it_consultant

With SP1 the archive mailbox can live on a separate message store. For example, our archive message store is on a low cost 1.4 TB drive whereas the active data is on a SAS array. We enforce message retention using journaling etc. I have a hard time running software that runs on top of, or hooks deeply into, MS Exchange. I have had too many bad experiences with that set up.