Email Archiving and Limitless Mailbox Quotas

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Email Archiving and Limitless Mailbox Quotas

• Frank Pettinicchio
• Frank.pettinicchio_at_mcgill.ca

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Sound familiar?

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We will cover the following

• The problem from the IT perspective
• The problem from the user perspective
• Our objectives
• Potential solutions
• Network PST archives
• Smaller quotas
• Spam filtering
• Our choice - why
• Functionality
• Cost
• Implementation
• User/ Central IT Experience to date

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Administrative Headache

• Email growing in volume every year
• Large amounts of expensive SAN storage (mission
  critical high availability)
• Back up costs (tape libraries, media)
• Long back ups tighten back up windows
• Recovery from data loss or corruption gets more
  difficult and longer
• Reduces the efficiency of Exchange Service
• Managing users needs and expectations

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Explosive Growth of Email

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Explosive Growth of Email

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Administrative Headache

• Recovering user email items
• Complaints about mailbox quotas
• Force users to clean up (delete mail)
• Increase the quota
• VIP services
• Usually the help desk bears the brunt

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User headache

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User headache

• Nag messages
• Have to clean up regularly
• Move mail to PST files
• Hope you dont delete important stuff
• Corporate data
• Technical information
• Research collaboration
• Spend hours weekly managing your email

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Our objectives

• Reduce our costs
• Disk storage
• Backup hardware and tapes
• Reduce the stress on exchange and potential for
  mail store corruption
• Reduce our administration efforts
• Quota management
• User mail stores
• Improve the users experience

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Strategies Considered and Rejected

• Play with the mailbox quota (currently 300MB for
  staff)
• smaller
• exacerbate administration
• Complicate the users life
• Goes against trend of larger email
• VIP absolutely could not tolerate small quotas
• Larger
• Increase in hardware and operational costs

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Promote PST file usage

• PST are prone to corruption over time and hard to
  repair
• Hard 2GB limit
• If stored locally
• access is restricted to one computer
• Typically not backed up
• When stored on a server
• Improves access but
• Still contributes to storage woes
• If left open can not be backed up
• Corporate data is left unsecured

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Spam Filtering Package in Place

• Implemented, we filter 60-70 of the 8,000-10,000
  messages processed by our gateway
• The growth however is in intra university mail
• More collaboration
• Notices
• More and larger attachments
• Even the email itself is larger due to the richer
  formats

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Exchange Servers at McGill

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Exchange growth trends

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Search for HSM

• Hierarchical Storage Management
• Set policy on when to move to lower tier (less
  expensive storage)
• Set policy on how long the file exists online
• Policy on whether the file is deleted at some
  future date
• The user experiences longer delays when reading a
  file that has been archived

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Email Archiving Software

• Development driven by
• Corporate regulation
• Regulatory body compliance requirements
• Employee productivity
• Cost of storage
• Business continuity (email availability)
• email as corporate memory and knowledge

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What is email archiving?

• Archive email to cheaper storage
• Policy driven (mailbox quota, email age)
• Single instance and compression of 30-60
• A stub replaces the mail item (user sees a
  different icon)
• Allow users to see and search the archived mail
• Allows central policy on retention
• No more nag and annoyance to user
• Reduce users time spent on email

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The players

• AXS-ONE (SUN)
• C2C SYSTEMS LIMITED
• CONNECTED CORP. (ARCHIVE-IT.COM LTD.)
• CRYOSERVER LTD
• EMANAGE, INC
• IBM
• ILUMIN SOFTWARE SERVICES, INC
• IRON MOUNTAIN, INC
• IXOS SOFTWARE AG
• KVS, INC. (Symantec)
• LEGATO SYSTEMS, INC./EMC CORPORATION
• PERSIST TECHNOLOGIES/HEWLETT-PACKARD
• SUN MICROSYSTEMS
• ZANTAZ, INC
• ZIPLIP

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Our Choice

• Zantaz vs. Symantec
• These seemed to fit best within the requirements
  we had
• Many of the others are adapted packages to take
  advantage of the emerging market
• Eventually we chose Symantec

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Criteria (2)

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Criteria

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Cost

• Expensive
• We decided to price out the hardware separately
• Sun AMD x86
• Apple SAN
• The bids were still in the 250-350K for 7,000
  staff
• Finally Symantec broke through with a generous
  offer of 188,000

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Implementation

• ESI (consultants) installed and configured
• Our staff assisted
• Implementation was successful
• Enlisted 40 volunteers to enroll in the pilot
• Plan was to deploy in May
• We had problems

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the problems

• Problems with OWA
• Did not supported Linux
• Non-IE browsers not supported
• In a controlled, pure MS shop the product should
  work without problems

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Experience to Date

• Works as advertised
• Most mailboxes shrank 40-50
• Save for the problems that Symantec is to fix we
  would have deployed university wide

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Lessons Learned

• Make the vendor demonstrate features that are
  critical to you
• Get it on paper
• Most of these products are geared for corporate
  institutions with strong control over IT policy
• Universities have a divers environment and may
  find it hard politically to adapt

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Limitless Mailbox Quotas

• Remove the quota and archive by age of mail
• Retain the quota (virtual) and archive all older
  mail until the mailbox falls to a of the
  mailbox quota