Journaling

[nitrokid]

Hi all,

We're going to be installing an Exchange 2003 server soon and need to journal all mail for compliance reasons.
I've seen some documentation with suggestions that you should keep the size of the journal mailbox low. Is this assuming that that mailbox is on the same information store as the live mail system? We're looking at having the live Exchange system on its own server/store and having the journal mailbox on its own server & store to minimise impact to the production environment.
Also, in terms of archiving the journal mailbox, would you typically use a third-party solution for this to retain the complaincy of the mails?

Cheers

 

[Zelandakh]

For compliance I wouldn't use journaling at all.

Look at third party stuff like GFi Mail Archiver or Enterprise Vault or similar which offer compliance tools rather than tools to offer compliance.

 

[58sniper]

Make sure your storage can handle the IOPS that journaling will impose. With things like Enterprise Vault, the IOPS per user can be as high as 6. Compare that to the IOPS of ~.5 per user without. That's right - a half of an IOPS. So you're looking at up to 1200% increase in IOPS on your storage. If you're putting the archiving solution into place in an existing environment, chances are that your storage won't be able to handle this, and you'll suffer poor performance.

Also keep in mind that journaling only does envelope level archiving. You don't get anything else like read/unread status, what folder it's in.

Most of those solutions also require installation of utilities and/or clients on the Exchange mailbox server, OWA server, and the end user clients.

There are archiving solutions that don't require this. I'll decline to mention them as I work for one and it would sound like a sales pitch.

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/

 

[nitrokid]

Thanks guys,

So Zelandakh, getting Exchange to journal to a mailbox, then using GFI to pick up the mail from that journal mailbox would be the best solution in your eyes?

as far as I'm aware, that way GFI MailArchiver doesn't install anything on the Exchange box, just picks up mail over IMAP...

 

[nitrokid]

also, what are the main benefits of using an archiving solution with Exchange rather than Exchange's journaling feature on its own?

 

[58sniper]

The journaling feature just collects everything in one mailbox. Eventually, you need to DO SOMETHING with that mail. You can't just let it continue to grow.

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/

 

[nitrokid]

Cheers guys,

So archiving...We're looking into disk space requirements. Is there any common formula that can be used to work this out? We realise its not as simple as measuring daily Exchange IS growth as emails are deleted and also archived to PSTs.

 

[58sniper]

But if you're journaling, it's all inbound mail while you're journaling. So - if you get 1GB of new mail into your environment per day for all users, and you've got journaling set for all databases, then your journal mailbox will grow by 1GB every day. Journaling has nothing to do with what users delete or send to .pst.

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/