Exchange 2003 Archiving Solution recommendations

[mlchris2]

So I've searched the web and found several Exchange Archiving Solutions. Here are the few I'm looking at;

-Barracuda
-metalogix Professional Archive Manager for Exchange
-Quest Archive Manager
-Sunbelt Exchange Archiver
-GFI Mail Archiver
-Sherpa Archive Attender
-SonaSafe for Email Archiving
-RedGate Exchange Server Archiver


Does anyone have first hand experience with any one of these products?

I have two goals; Cost Effective & Easy to implement/maintain. I have about 40 users, but I'm leaning towards implementing an archive solution on just a few (legal and executive management).


Mark C.

 

[58sniper]

I have experience with almost all of those. You don't mention the two leading archiving vendors: Symantec (Enterprise Vault), and Mimosa Systems (NearPoint).

It all comes down to WHAT you're trying to accomplish, and WHY you need to accomplish it.

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/

 

[mlchris2]

so it appears I left out some other pertinent information. Im running Exchange 2003 Standard and having problems with the Mail Store reaching 75GB. So I'm doing research whether to implement a archive solution and set mailbox limits in place or upgrade to Exchange Enterprise edition.

I've got two problems; Users hoarding massive amounts of mailbox space. (I just started with the company and they have no Email standards in place, I plan on changing that).

The other problem, the Legal and Executive dept asked about keeping email for 10yrs as part of a retention policy. Outlook's Archiving isn't a good solution, although it works.




Mark C.

 

[w33mhz]

One other point to add along with Pat is how much money are you going to get to implement. I am not sure what the pricing is on all of those products you mentioned, but I know that Symantec is in Gartners "magic quadrant" and it is EXPENSIVE, but can do everything you want and more. Barracuda is at the opposite end of the pricing specturm and can do your basic needs, as I recall they didn't have an outlook integration, so you or the user (however you want to set it up) would have to logon to a web page and find the archived email, but that was a few months ago they may have one now.

Windows Haiku:

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

 

[58sniper]

The other problem, the Legal and Executive dept asked about keeping email for 10yrs as part of a retention policy. Outlook's Archiving isn't a good solution, although it works.

That's absolutely NOT a retention policy. If your legal and executives are thinking about retention, you have to remove all abilities of the end user to remove items from that archive. You have to rid your environment of .pst files as well.


As for advice, stay away from anything that uses journaling to do archiving.

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/

 

[ShackDaddy]

I have some experience with Mimosa Nearpoint and GFI MailArchiver.

MailArchiver is cost effective and easy to implement, but sometimes frustrating to maintain. I've built and maintained four different roll-outs of MailArchiver.

Nearpoint is expensive and difficult to implement and maintain, but has features that mid-to-enterprise sized environments would value. I've built one Nearpoint installation and done maintenance and upgrades on three pre-existing installations.

I've also worked with MXLogic and SMARSH hosted archiving solutions, if you are interested in a hosted option.

I would take Pat's advice to avoid a journaling-based solution with a few grains of salt, since MOST email archiving solutions are journaling-based and meet the most general requirements of the industry. If you take non-journaling as a spec, then you've greatly limited your options. When you are looking at something that's cost-effective for under 50 users, chances are you'll be using a journaling-based solution.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[58sniper]

But if you do take one that uses journaling, make sure you take into account the additional IOPS that it will generate. Journaling also doesn't grab all data, so you have to keep that in mind.

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/

 

[red1965]

Hi Guys, just wanted to speak about Nearpoint as this is the only archiving solution i have experience of

I am one of two people that are manageing our newly intalled archiving system.

Experience so far is that its tricky to get working 100%, but once all issues are reolved it offers exellent features such as

single instancing
owa support
DR, mailbox and exchange server recovery
outlook mailboxs dont reach oversize limts
dehydrate delete means that deleted items are scrutinized

We have opted for full rentention of all e-mails, ie no expiration from the archive

 

[mlchris2]

thanks for the addition. I'm still in the process of finding and evaluating Archive solutions.... project been put on hold for a month or two till we re-evaluate funds. :-\

Mark C.

 

[58sniper]

Dehydrate Delete means a whole lot more than just that, red1965, but that's a discussion for another thread.

NearPoint also is completely agentless, so it requires nothing on the end user workstations or web enabled smartphones to work*. Or the Exchange server. NearPoint also supports SharePoint and file system archiving, and single instances across ALL THREE PLATFORMS. No journaling, no MAPI crawling, either. Something you can't get from any other solution. No additional load on Exchange.

* smartphones require javascript being enabled.

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/

 

[baddos]

I was looking at the commvault one, anybody have experience with that one?

 

[58sniper]

No scalability - especially in their index. And, it relies on stubbing, which doesn't reduce number of items in a mailbox - a known cause of performance problems.

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/

 

[red1965]

58Sniper,

I would very much appreciate it if you could educate me on exactley what dehydrate does, as i am a bit fuzzy on this proces.

Would you be happy to educate me on this

If so, should i create a new thread?