Email Archiving in Exhange 2010 1

[somedea]

Looking for comments and opinions here. We have an Exchange 2003 Enterprise server in a law firm. For various business reasons, mailbox quotas don't work for us. We are growing out of control. We started looking at archiving solutions, like Enterprise Vault and Mimosa. They look good, but expensive. We could upgrade to Exchange 2010 for about half the cost. Is anyone using Exhange Server 2010 as an archiving solution, and if so, comments?
Looks like SP1 should work with Outlook 2007, which is what we have, and separate databases for production and archive should make backups easier, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's actually using it!

 

[58sniper]

Well, I can answer this - it depends.

Mailbox quotas should be used - even if they are really high. You need to protect your storage from filling up and dismounting your databases.

The archiving solutions that Mimosa and Symantec give you are completely different from what's in Exchange 2010. It all depends on what you need to do. If it's just allow more mail to accumulate, then the Exchange 2010 solution should be fine. SP1 is out and you can put the archive databases on another volume if needed (although Exchange 2010 was geared towards SATA and cheap storage for production databases).

If you need eDiscovery, tiered retention policies, legal compliance, etc., then a third party solution is needed.

If you look at third party solutions, stay away from those that require journaling (like Enterprise Vault and nearly everything else) unless you plan on redoing your storage allocation to handle the IOPS increase. Only Mimosa's NearPoint doesn't use journaling, and doesn't require anything be installed on the Exchange server.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[58sniper]

Oh - and don't look for the 2007 support for the 2010 archive anytime soon.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[somedea]

Thanks so much! Exactly what I was looking for...Interesting about the 2007 support. What I had read made it sound like it's already out there.
So you would recommend Mimosa if we go third party? As I said. we've looked at it, and it does seem like a good product.

 

[58sniper]

Well, a caveat first - I used to work for them (Mimosa). But I went to work for them because I believed in their product. That hasn't changed. It does not require addins for Exchange or Outlook, which is nice. All processing happens off of your Exchange servers - this is critical as anything that's doing indexing, archiving, retention policies and other resource intensive tasks can really zap performance if they are happening on the Exchange server. NearPoint can also do SharePoint and File System Archiving, and single instance across ALL THREE PLATFORMS, and across ALL EXCHANGE SERVERS. That's huge - especially if you're going to have a lengthy retention period (more than a couple of years).

Outlook 2007 support for accessing the archive in Exchange 2010 is not available. And won't be for quite a while. Outlook Web App can access the archive.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/