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

If you have ever accidently deleted a document from SharePoint, then you know how difficult it is to restore a single item from SharePoint. The cause of this problem is that SharePoint has a relatively weak backup engine and it does not give you the option of performing single-file restores from a backup. SharePoint document versioning does not help either. When you delete a document, SharePoint Server removes all version history.

New solutions for SharePoint archiving can be the answer to this problem. SharePoint archiving solutions capture SharePoint content at the item level and keep it secure in a central repository for search and compliance. Individual items in the archive can also be copied back to SharePoint to, in effect, serve for single-item restore. So a SharePoint archival solution delivers benefits for both archival and data protection.

A single solution for SharePoint archiving and data protection improves SharePoint manageability and reduces cost.

… Bob Spurzem

Motorola recently completed its sale of Good Technology to Visto, a rival mobile email provider. Good Technology markets mobile messaging software and services for synchronizing corporate email on a variety of devices, as well as a variety of other products targeted at the mobile enterprise worker.

The market for corporate push email is now effectively a two-vendor race. The current market leader is Research In Motion. The other is Microsoft’s ActiveSync. RIM supports its BlackBerry devices, and ActiveSync supports a multitude of mobile devices and mail servers such as Exchange Server, Critical Path, PostPath, Kerio, Scalix, and Zimbra.

For many organizations, mobile email support is now much simpler than it was: Support is provided for both BlackBerry and a variety of smart phones with ActiveSync. The employee picks which one he or she prefers.

Good’s market value was thus fading away, and the sale is no surprise.

… Bob Spurzem

Archiving is becoming more and more attractive for many SharePoint users.

SharePoint is a natural application to manage file sharing, collaboration, and content sharing. With the introduction of MOSS 2007, its popularity has grown rapidly. However, SharePoint’s success brings challenges in storage growth, item-level restore, retention, and compliance. Just like Exchange Server, when SharePoint farms grow, performance suffers, recovery times lengthen, and compliance risk increases.

SharePoint archiving solutions copy documents and content to a central repository and the original files can be replaced with stub files to reduce storage. The resulting archive is managed according to retention policy and the content can be easily searched for legal discovery.

If you don’t have an archive strategy for SharePoint, you probably should develop one. It is better to anticipate storage growth, and proactively preserve SharePoint records, than to leave everything until disaster hits in the form of a major lawsuit.

… Bob Spurzem

Many organizations are still running Exchange 2003 and it is working well. Exchange 2007 is the current active release, and Exchange 2010 will be released at the end of 2009.

Should E2003 users upgrade to E2007, or simply wait and upgrade directly to E2010, skipping E2007 altogether? The key issues are:

• What is the age of the hardware currently supporting your E2003 environment? Can your existing hardware provide good email service until you move to Exchange 2010?
• What are your budget constraints? Can you afford to purchase Exchange 2007 CALs this year and then purchase new CALs again for Exchange 2010?
• Can you afford the staff resources to perform the Exchange 2007 migration now and then repeat the process again in 2010?
• Do you require support for unified communications now, or can you wait until 2010?
• Do you need the storage archiving capabilities that Exchange 2010 now includes?
• Do you need the simplified high availability capabilities inherent in Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs)?

When you eventually upgrade to Exchange 2010, you will require new server hardware, so plan accordingly.

… Bob Spurzem

Government agencies at all levels are responsible for disseminating public information. This includes both paper and electronic information. Electronic information includes email, files, documents, spreadsheets, and all other forms of electronic information. President Obama recently issued this memorandum that endorses U.S. FOIA and reaffirms the commitment to accountability and transparency at all government branches.

Government agencies in countries with Freedom of Information acts must carefully plan for retention of electronic information, including email, to comply with such rulings. Email records are very challenging to manage and search due to the inherent limitations of the email server, and the complex structure of email information. As a result, email continues to need specialized archiving technology, different from that for other types of electronic information. Email archiving solutions are needed to satisfy Freedom of Information requirements.

… Bob Spurzem

When we think about archiving, email comes to mind first. For the majority of organizations, email archiving has become a standard application for managing email storage growth and for email discovery.

Archiving is now spreading to other forms of electronic communication, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, and files.

What about information in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter? This is a new form of electronic data and it’s too early to know its value for e-discovery. Keep an eye on social networking in your organization and monitor its use. If a significant amount of business content begins to show up in these channels, then it may be cause to consider some type of management and archiving.

If your organization has had a case where social networks data was discoverable, please post a comment. We are interested to see how this nascent challenge evolves.

… Bob Spurzem

Some people feel e-discovery covers the needs of archiving. For example, in this article, the author takes the position that archiving is expensive and for the most part unnecessary, while a full-service e-discovery solution is the better choice.

The cost of archiving is not the point. The key value of archiving is preservation of data. It is a major fault to assume that the data you wish to “discover” is sitting where you expect, waiting to be discovered. Often the data was deleted by the end user and can only be found on an old backup. Or a file may have been edited, without any change to its name.

Archiving is a necessary underpinning of e-discovery. It removes the risk of lost data and spoliation.

… Bob Spurzem

The e-discovery challenge is worldwide, although granted it’s at its most draining in the U.S. For example, see this recent posting about new e-discovery laws in Australia. It discusses new federal rules in Australia that require all email and electronic information be produced and exchanged, preferably in their original formats. It sounds just like the recent Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments for electronically stored information (ESI) that apply in the United States.

Existing laws for the preservation and production of data for legal discovery aren’t limited to paper. They apply equally to electronic information.

… Bob Spurzem

Iron Mountain announced a new hosted archiving service for files. Virtual File Store includes an on-premise appliance combined with hosted storage:

• Information is moved to the appliance either via automation or manually.
• Files are then automatically moved to secure cloud storage hosted by Iron Mountain.
• It can be configured for any set of users.

The benefit of the service is to reduce the amount of storage on local file servers, while preserving data for the long term.

This new Iron Mountain offering fits well with the latest trends for electronic information retention and e-discovery. Organizations need to store files and other electronic information long term, and they want a means to reduce storage costs. One customer, quoted in the article, revealed that he reduced his total file storage from half a terabyte to 200GB, thereby lowering costs associated with local storage, backup, and maintenance.

There will be a plethora of new solutions that address the needs of long-term electronic storage, while reducing storage costs. Local storage solutions are also available. The business drivers are the need to preserve electronic information for the business content it contains, regulatory compliance, and legal discovery.

… Bob Spurzem

This recent article discusses cloud backup and the challenge to scale. The author makes many good points about data integrity and scalability, and the same principles apply to archiving. Cloud archival of critical enterprise information seems easy and makes sense. On the practical side, there are risks of data loss, security breaches, and slow data retrieval.

I recommend a hybrid approach. Keep a local copy of your archive data for extra insurance against data loss and for fast retrieval. And keep a cloud-based archive for disaster recovery. Iron Mountain has taken this approach with its new Cloud-Based File Archiving.

Cloud based archival makes sense for many reasons, and for the multitude of customers who cannot afford a dedicated disaster recovery site, it may be the best option.

… Bob Spurzem

Email archiving has an important new product. This week, EMC announced the availability of SourceOne, the replacement for EmailXtender.

EMC’s EmailXtender is one of the original email archiving solutions. It has been bought and sold three times, and for the past several years has been sold by EMC. For years, rumors of a replacement persisted. The product has had distinctly low visibility over the last year or two.

Market leader Symantec is keenly aware of the new entrant. Witness this open letter from Symantec addressed to EMC customers. Symantec’s product is Enterprise Vault. It too has had multiple owners over its 10-year life span, including Veritas Software and KVS.

The requirements for email archiving have changed significantly since products first became available, and this is translating to continuing changes in technology. It also means that market leadership is still unstable, with leaders such as Symantec still subject to significant competitive pressure.

… Bob Spurzem

Archiving technology is evolving, and this means that sometimes customers move between solutions. The migrations aren’t straightforward.

A major area of difficulty is email “stubbing”--where the archive solution removes much of the email in an Exchange Store and leaves behind a short pointer to the removed information. Before archived data can be migrated to a new archive server, email stubs must be reunited or reversed. Sometimes it is impractical to put the email back together because of the space constraints of Exchange. In other cases, the archive solution does not provide tools to perform the stub reversal.

Here are some relevant suggestions when considering a new email archive solution:

• Make sure the email archive product or service has tools to reverse stubbing.
• Make sure PST export tools are available to assist the migration process.
• Consider the amount of archive data that will accumulate in the archive, say over five years, and calculate if there will be space on Exchange to reverse the stubs.
• Ideally, find an email archive solution that keeps a complete copy of email and attachments in the archive so stub reversal is not required.

… Bob Spurzem

Perhaps the slowing economy is encouraging small technology acquisitions.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting article on Oracle and the small acquisitions it has made in the past year. Oracle is well known for its large acquisitions (e.g., PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, and BEA), but it has also been busy scooping up small companies, some for as little as $5M. Oracle is not alone in its thirst for acquisition. Other cash-rich companies such as Cisco are also mentioned in this article.

New emerging technology companies normally have a battle for customer credibility. The challenges of the current economic climate exacerbate the problem, because funding sources are less available. So the arguments for going with large and financially stable vendors (e.g., Oracle, HP, Cisco, Microsoft) that offer similar technology are stronger than ever.

Being acquired by a larger vendor can have a positive outcome for small technology companies. The market for initial public stock offerings has for all purposes disappeared, so being acquired is the most likely financial exit scenario for stockholders.

… Bob Spurzem

Once again the importance of archiving email is revealed in the recent scandal involving tainted peanut butter and the executive who issued orders to ship peanut products that tested positive for salmonella. See, for example, this Wall Street Journal article. Internal company emails were examined by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reveal the truth.

The article underscores the importance of archiving email for its business content. For matters of business content, intellectual property, and as a record of written statements made by employees, all companies must adopt an email policy for retention and consider carefully how they will respond to investigations and requests for email records. An email archival solution is designed to retain email and make it accessible for quick search and discovery.

… Bob Spurzem