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The Archiving Alternative
So why is E-mail
Management Server the most cost effective alternative to
archiving?
The first question
each administrator needs to ask themselves is "Why am I looking
for an 'archiving' solution?". Is it driven by the business
need to retain e-mail data offsite for extended periods of time?
The answer to the question is generally, "No, that's not the
reason."
If you're an
Exchange administrator or anyone involved with the messaging
infrastructure at your company, you know very well why over the
last 4 or 5 years "E-mail Archiving" has become such a popular
catch phrase. The unfortunate thing about the catch phrase
is that it isn't even accurate. What the vast majority of
companies, from the smallest to the largest are looking for is
an alternative near-line storage solution to address the
continual growth of e-mail storage. As a company
specializing in messaging, we at MADSolutions know that the
primary cause of e-mail database bloat is directly related to
attachments. Our consultants hear customers tell their
end-users all the time not to send attachments through the
e-mail system and to use other means. The fact of the
matter is sending something through e-mail is quick and easy and
you can type a quick message to the recipient all at the same
time. So what's the solution?
A few
assumptions:
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A large
portion of users find e-mail one of their primary day to day
tools and that e-mail is often their number one application
of choice.
-
A large
portion of users organize or treat their e-mail like a
filing system in order to find things they've done, who they
communicated with, etc...
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A large
portion of users would like to continue to have access to
their e-mail even months after the fact. In many
cases, users want to be able to go back through years worth
of their e-mail.
-
Other
companies are not unlike MADSolutions in that keeping some
customer information and vendor information in e-mail is
common place and therefore we don't want anyone touching our
e-mail.
MADSolutions at
its very origin, roughly 8 years ago, created a product called "CleanMail" to remove
attachments from e-mail through the use of an Outlook add-in.
This proved very effective for dealing with individual mailboxes
and PSTs, however it lacked a number of features to address
storage demands at the database level. The server product
"Attachment Executive Server Side" proved extremely valuable to
corporate customers who initially adopted it. In fact so
valuable, almost every customer that purchased the initial
version is still using a version of it today. Today,
that version is, E-mail Management Server 2006.
| So why
is E-mail Management Server 2006 so effective? |
Before Attachments Were Removed |
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Take a few minutes to view the
before and after charts on this page.
Storage of attachments is
the number one cause of out of control database growth.
The average e-mail may be any where between 1 and 15
kilobytes in size, however the average attachment is
generally hundreds of kilobytes to megabytes in size.
The rate of growth of any
Exchange database is directly related to the number of
attachments sent through the e-mail system. The
number of e-mail without attachments that could occupy
the same amount of storage is any where from 10 to 100
fold. Thus the e-mail storage issue is more of an
attachment management issue than it is one of e-mail.
To the left the overall
storage required is roughly 338.1 Gigabytes, however in
the picture below, the storage required is only 126.8 Gigabytes
even though a large number of attachments (most recently
sent and received) continue to
remain within the e-mail system.
To address the issue,
replacing the attachments with
hyperlinks preserves the connection between the
attachment and the e-mail, however it frees up a
substantial amount of storage within the e-mail system. Given the current scenario, 4 times as
much e-mail can be stored in the same amount of space
which may equate to literally years worth of
correspondence. |
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After
Attachments Were Removed |
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If you're
still not convinced after looking at these statistics,
see for yourself what your organizational savings
would be by downloading our free Attachment Analyser.
Just for the fun of it, download
the analyser and check out your
mailbox or your boss' mailbox and see how effective
E-mail Management Server 2006 could be for your
organization.
Get the Free
Attachment Analyser! |
Last but not
least, why is it the most cost effective solution?
File storage is
relatively inexpensive. Tier 2 storage (inexpensive iSCSI
or SATA) SANS are made by virtually every manufacturer.
Terabytes worth of data can be stored at a fraction of the price
it once was. Moreover, the cost of many "archiving"
solutions begin in the 10's of thousands and have long
complicated installation procedures that not only require
professional services for implementation, but also tie
corporations to solutions, thus making them dependent on them in
order to retrieve their data. (Proprietary backend
solutions.)
MADSolutions
uses standard UNC and URL links to files stored on the desired
backend solution without any "Proprietary" hooks between your e-mail
environment and your data. Even without MADSolutions
software, corporations can continue to access their data via
every day common hyperlinks. Moreover, MADSolutions E-mail
Management Server 2006 sells at a VERY very inexpensive per
mailbox price that starts at roughly $10.00 USD. With
larger numbers of mailboxes, volume discounts are applied.
For corporations with 500 mailboxes, a flexible, inexpensive,
non-proprietary and effective solution like E-mail Management
Server 2006 costs less that $ 5,000.00 USD. In today's
competitive market place, why would you settle for anything but
a complete solution like E-mail Management Server 2006?
Find out how
your company can save money, time and energy with a true E-mail
Management Solution.
Get a quote today!
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