Crushing load on Email Server and Email Archiving
Email traffic is increasing every year. Today over a hundred emails are sent and received daily by a typical office employee. These emails include negotiations, memos, informational materials, company documents, etc.. A lot of these documents are email attachments. Another large category of attachments are documents which employees send to themselves for safe keeping and easy retrieval. Currently, more documents are stored as attachments on email servers than on file structure. Employees believe that documents in emails are safer than documents on file servers. The reason is simple; employees have one mailbox on the company server and they have multiple locations for saving the files. They may have a local drive, a personal drive on the file server, a shared drive on the file server, a SharePoint location for projects, etc.. The employees use these locations, but the most trusted location is email.
Once we understand this phenomenon, we understand why there is such a high load on the mail server and why the employees are so reluctant to delete their emails. As IT professionals, we are responsible for keeping the company infrastructure up and running. We are faced with the difficult challenge of keeping the email server running robustly and yet giving the users a large mailbox.
Intradyn has been in the storage industry for over a decade and has a solution which satisfies the requirements of both IT professionals and the end users. The RazorSafe email archiving appliance is a hardware appliance and ORCA email archiving appliance is a virtual appliance. Both solutions can take the load off the email server and give employees access to their emails. First, you implement the solution in your environment. This step takes less than an hour. At this point, a copy of all the email communication is also being archived on your solution. Second, use the provided tool to copy the historical email from the mail server to the archiving solution. Third, after the historical emails are on the archiving solution, you can implement a quota limit on the mailboxes and delete older emails. The load on your email server will be reduced and performance will improve.
The users can get to their emails directly from their MS Outlook client. There is a small plug-in which is installed on the mail client and they have direct access to the archives, completely bypassing the email server. They can also get to their emails via web browser using their Active Directory or LDAP credentials.
