Exchange 2010 is the next version of Exchange Server. It is due for release at the end of 2009 or early 2010. Exchange 2010 includes many new features and enhancements for archiving.
It’s early days for Exchange built-in archiving, and storage management is an important area in which it falls short:
- It does not move archived email off the Exchange Server. Since email never leaves the Exchange Server, Exchange data protection, storage, and recoverability will all be adversely affected as the total Exchange storage increases.
- It (as well as all previous versions of Exchange) does not perform single instance storage across all of its stores. This means the email you archive in Exchange 2010 is not de-duplicated, which further compounds archive storage problems.
At last month’s TechEd, a Microsoft employee presented Exchange 2010 archiving and positioned the offering as a “personal archiving” solution and not an “organizational archiving” solution. This is correct. Today, an organizational archive must keep the archive data off-host, fully de-duplicated, and under full retention management.
Exchange 2010 archiving is a useful replacement for PST files and personal archiving. But it falls short of a true organizational archive solution. Today, only third-party solutions deliver all the features required.
… Bob Spurzem
A few comments on this…
Keep in Mind that Archiving and Compliance Journaling are not the same thing. If your organization has compliance needs than Journaling is what you need. If you’re just giving users larger mailboxes then that’s typically been done with a 3rd party archiving solution. Many times those solutions have merged the two into a single solution but the problem has been the end user experience (shortcuts, offline archives, etc).
To fully appreciate the Exchange 2010 archiving solution you need to look at the total Exchange 2010 design points.
1. E2010 was designed to run on 1TB 7200RPM Desktop SATA drives that are direct attached in a NON-RAID configuration. This means your total storage costs (Drives, HBA’s, RAID controllers are now) very cheap.
2. Microsoft is now supporting up to a 2TB database EDB if you have 3 copies of the database in a DAG.
3. The online archive is designed to be used with a very large mailbox (typically described to be at least 1 year of email online/in the OST).
4. With the addition of single message recovery you no longer have to restore very large database files to undelete end-users deleted messages.
Now with this understanding you can now give users very large offline mailboxes (up to even 20GB) with very low hardware costs and not have to worry about restoring 2TB databases from tape.
Now, add the ability to give users an Offline Personal Archive (that is that it’s only available when you’re online or via OWA) which would typically only contain email that is much older and not frequently used, then points about needing PST’s or an archiving solution for the purposes of large mailboxes don’t necessarily hold true.
With respect to the requirements for Compliance Journaling, there is an argument to be made for an archiving solution and possible storage issues since those solutions don’t utilize this type of storage solution.
So, I believe that before people dismiss the new features in Exchange 2010, they need to truly understand the big picture of E2010.
If 2010 archiving features is “personal grade”, then we would stick to PST files. That is because they give our mobile user off line access to their data, plus it relives the capacity from the Exchange server…
This is not to say that 3rd party archiving does not deserve a place…
Please Wait
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