Avoiding an Infrastructure Cost Explosion as You Move to Exchange 2010 Metalogix Archive Manager Evaluator Group Inc. Technology Insight Series Executive Editor: Randy Kerns
Version 1: January 2012 Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or stored in a database or retrieval system for any purpose without the express written consent of Evaluator Group Inc. The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Evaluator Group assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. Evaluator Group makes no expressed or implied warranties in this document relating to the use or operation of the products described herein. In no event shall Evaluator Group be liable for any indirect, special, inconsequential or incidental damages arising out of or associated with any aspect of this publication, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. The Evaluator Series Research and Technology Insight Series are trademarks of Evaluator Group, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page: ii
Table of Contents Executive Summary... 1 Email Overview... 1 The Need for a Solution... 3 Defining a Solution... 3 Email Archiving Requirements... 4 Functionality... 4 Administration... 4 Performance... 5 Integrity and Security... 5 Email Archiving Benefits... 5 Economic Value... 6 Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange... 7 Summary... 8 Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page: iii
Executive Summary Email with Microsoft Exchange is one of the most critical applications in almost all businesses and organizations. The continued growth in the number of emails and the amount of data transferred via email creates an increasing set of problems for Information Technology. Keeping the Exchange environment under control and optimized to meet the organization demands is an imperative. The major tool that Information Technology has for controlling the Exchange environment is software to archive and manage emails. Moving the emails out of the active Exchange environment and into a managed repository can avoid the unbridled growth that causes continuous and time-consuming projects to expand and move databases. Reducing the amount of data also helps maintain the performance of the Exchange system. It avoids the slowdown that occurs with all versions of Exchange as databases become bloated with unneeded emails and attachments. Archiving of emails solves major problems for Exchange environments but the requirements around archiving need to be thoroughly investigated and understood. With knowledge of how to implement an efficient archiving environment, the best solution can be selected. An upgrade to Exchange provides the opportunity to evaluate the infrastructure supporting Exchange including archiving. Greater efficiency with new technologies can lower infrastructure and operational costs. Email Overview Email is a critical application on which communication and even business transactions are dependent. The pervasiveness of email is highlighted by the magnitude of the number of emails. To put it into perspective 1 : North America alone sends more than 4 trillion emails per day. There are 1.88 billion email users worldwide. Over 97% of all documents are now electronic. Capacity demand for emails continues to increase where 1TB of emails today will increase to 2.5TB in three years. These facts highlight that increasing demands for email storage requires changes to the storage environment to be made at some time introducing administration tasks and costs. The increasing capacity demands mean that more storage will be needed. Storage systems can be replaced with larger systems or additional space allocated until a new system is required. When the space for emails needs to be expanded, more work and greater risk are involved. 1 Forrester Research Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 1
There also may be performance issues to address. The amount of data in a database can slow down access. The increase in storage system capacity may create a bottleneck if the storage system does not have its performance capability scaled at the same time as the capacity is increased. With Exchange 2010 implementations, there are a number of common factors that significantly increase the amount of storage required to host Exchange. With Exchange 2010, there is no single instancing support so replicated attachments are maintained, consuming space in the databases and on storage systems. This can create problems for organizations upgrading from previous versions where single instancing in Exchange was significantly reducing the storage footprint. In addition, the data protection mechanics introduced with Exchange 2010 requires multiple databases called Database Availability Groups. These multiple, replicated databases compound the storage problems. Even with the multiple databases for availability, data protection in the form of backups or remote replication is still required and the significant increase in database size linearly increases the time and impact of routine backups and often makes the time to recovery a potential problem. All these factors around larger and multiple databases greatly increase administrative cost and effort. Another issue for Exchange is the handling of Personal Storage Tables (PSTs) or, really the lack of handling of PSTs. PSTs are an unmanaged, uncontrolled environment where emails may exist without central IT knowledge. While Exchange 2010 provides an alternative to PST s, it does not prevent users from creating PST s nor does it provide a means of managing previously created PST s which may be scattered, unmanaged, around the network. As mentioned before, performance degrades when capacity increases. With the number and size of emails increasing as well as the number of email users, performance in the Exchange environment is constantly in jeopardy. Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 2
Figure 1: Email Storage and Protection The Need for a Solution Maintaining the email operational environment with consistent performance and availability is expected of IT. Maintaining it without having to do continuous upgrade and expansion to meet ongoing needs is the only practical and economic goals for IT in keeping the environment under control. In most environments, the management of emails requires some compliance or governance controls. The additional security required gets more impacting as the number of emails increase without a solution that automates the process and handling of the security demands. The control and management of emails must be visible through Exchange so that it is a seamless process. For completeness, the emails currently in PSTs must also be managed as part of the process. Defining a Solution The solution must manage an ever-growing amount of emails and attachments and is characterized as an archiving system where the emails can be moved to storage and out of Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 3
email databases and PSTs based on rules and criteria. The movement must be automated and able to be expanded or extended as the number of emails increases. The emails that are archived still must be available for access by users but without requiring additional administrative effort or end-user workflow changes. The solution must also incorporate or enable the compliance and governance requirements in place today or on the horizon. Email Archiving Requirements Now that the need and the basics of a solution have been identified, the requirements can be further investigated and defined. Requirements must be broad enough to deal not only with email problems today, but also anticipate (or at least accommodate) demands in both increased number of emails and capacity increase as well as future compliance needs. The functionality of the archiving solution must be clearly defined. Functionality Create a user searchable index where a full content search can be performed. Ensure archived emails are visible and recallable by users without change to workflow. Archive PSTs and include in the searchable index. Eliminate mailbox quotas. Automate data protection of archived emails with multiple copies to multiple target devices. Establish threshold controls for the Exchange databases to automate the archiving and maintain performance levels. Introduce single instancing to collapse repeated emails and attachments. Add compression for data reduction. Encrypt emails and attachments for security. The functionality requirements defined above are the items focused on initially. Beyond those are the administrative requirements for managing the email environment. Administration can be economically challenging over the long-term if the solution does not have the capabilities required. Administration Installation must be easy and relatively quick. There should be a small footprint such that there is little required for each user. It is important that the movement of emails be transparent for visibility and access. This is usually implemented with stubbing for direct client delivery. The usage should be intuitive and not require training for administrators or for users. Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 4
There should be an easy means to export emails as may be required for discovery actions. The ability to migrate emails between media tiers, including offline or a cloud service, should be a simple target setting. One of the primary reasons for deploying email archiving is to maintain a performance level that does not degrade as more emails are handled. Correspondingly, adding archiving must not create any performance impacts. Performance Ability to scale to 10 s of thousands of email users and millions of emails. No performance effect with increased number of emails. No impacts to Exchange operation during recalls of archived emails. Security and integrity of the data are addressed as a common function in IT. When it comes to archived data where there are compliance requirements, there are additional considerations: data is retained for long periods of time across technology generations and there is potential litigation that will put demands on data handling. Special attention needs to be paid to these requirements. Integrity and Security To verify the integrity, a digital fingerprint of the data needs to be created so that it can be verified on subsequent access or validated periodically for assurance of the storage technology. A security mechanism must be required with no optional assignments by administrators. All accesses to email must be verified for security and an audit trail log of accesses created. Retention of emails must be managed with automated deletion eligibility and approvals. Legal holds must be handled in the case of potential legal actions. WORM settings for the storage system must also be controlled in coordination with the archiving software. Email Archiving Benefits Ultimately, the benefits from email archiving will justify deployment. The combined effect of implementing the functions is to Optimize Exchange. Optimizing Exchange means getting the maximum utilization from Exchange and continuing in that fashion despite increasing numbers of emails and users. The benefits from email archiving touch many areas: Performance of the Exchange environment is stable even with increasing email traffic and users. The Exchange deployment can be stable for a longer period of time. An effective email archiving implementation can eliminate the need for desperation upgrades to the Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 5
Exchange environment. This also permits consistent management and administration for a longer period of time. The database storage utilization can be stabilized. Rather than scaling up or scaling out storage and migrating databases, the primary storage used for Exchange databases can be used for much longer periods. This reduces capital costs, administrative efforts, and risk. Users can perform self-service actions, reducing the burden on administrators and increasing the user satisfaction. Self-service actions include: o Archiving of emails independent of the automated rules or criteria. o Recalls of archived emails. o Searches of archived emails performing ediscovery actions. o Unlimited mailbox sizes to eliminate user management. Greater control can be exerted over the email environment o Personal archives (PSTs) can be handled in the archive o Data protection of archived data can be automated and reduced to protection at the time of archiving. Compliance and governance requirements can be met and automated. o Retention controls for defined periods of time. o Legal holds can be applied by administrators. o Security for controlling access to emails along with audit trail logs of access. o ediscovery can be enabled using search functions with indexed information. Email archiving can also be integrated with archiving of files and SharePoint data. An integrated solution provides a wider span of benefits for archiving and leverages the archiving storage system. Economic Value The savings from email archiving come from putting economic value on the areas of benefit. The economic value can be used in ROI and TCO calculations. Savings come from avoidance of purchasing additional primary storage to meet capacity demand on a periodic basis as the number of emails and amount of data increases. In addition to the capital expense savings, there are savings from administration reduction of migration and storage deployment and from the repetitive backup operations for the additional data on the primary storage systems. Administrative savings is also realized from transitioning users to self-service operations. Reduction in administration time for manual archiving and recalls and elimination of managing user mailbox size limitations can be significant. For Exchange 2010, user time spent managing personal archives can also be saved. Other areas for economic savings are more difficult to measure but can be important depending on the circumstances. Savings from implementation of compliance capabilities and facilitating ediscovery operations can be very large if there is a legal situation or requirement. Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 6
If used as part of an integrated solution for file archiving and SharePoint archives, the contribution to overall savings is additive but difficult to quantify. Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange Metalogix offers a complete Exchange email archiving solution with the features to fulfill the requirements for an effective implementation. Deploying the Metalogix Archive Manager enables optimization of capacity and performance for the Exchange environment. The solution is completely transparent with no client-side requirements for installation. The search interface is WebArchive which supports mobile devices and a full content search. The Metalogix Archive Manager integrates with File Archiving and SharePoint Archiving to provide a common solution with consolidated searching. The following diagram from Metalogix highlights the solution and capabilities. Figure 2: Metalogix Archive Manager Solution Highlighted features of the Metalogix Archive Manager include: Transparent access by users through Outlook and OWA Content indexing and searching using web browser interface Compliance support o Retention management and policy enforcement Modification and deletion prevention Automated deletion option at end of retention period o Data authenticity using digital fingerprinting o Legal holds o Audited access o Export of selected email information Rule-based policy engine for classifying and archiving emails Data protection automation o Multiple copies to distributed storage devices o Automated HSM to different storage tiers The important area of administration for email archiving and email management is also addressed with features in Metalogix Archive Manager: Simple installation and set up PST archiver Elimination of mailbox quotas Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 7
User self-service recalls of emails and explicit archiving Support for client systems including Outlook 2011 and MAS OS-X Entourage As an email archiving solution, Metalogix Archive Manager provides capabilities needed to optimize the Exchange environment. Email archiving is integrated in the larger Metalogix Enterprise Data Archiving Platform which includes file archiving and SharePoint archiving. Full exploitation of data archiving from a common platform provides the capacity and performance benefits and the administrative benefit of working with a common solution. Summary Evaluator Group sees email archiving as a major tool for IT in dealing with the growing demand for more capacity from greater numbers of emails, larger amounts of email data, and more email users. The value can be seen in the economics of how much it costs to store information and the operational expense in supporting and Exchange environment. Archiving of emails is another means of achieving more effective usage of resources. Risk reduction is another high value aspect of email archiving. Less risk from introducing new or different primary storage systems to accommodate demand, less risk from making system changes to alleviate performance or capacity issues, and less risk from not having a controlled environment are all major benefits. As much of the Exchange user base upgrades to Exchange 2010, an optimal window for justifying an email infrastructure refresh has presented itself. With native single instancing eliminated and the incorporation of Database Availability Groups or DAGs, Exchange 2010 upgrades will by definition require an extensive expansion of storage capacity unless users incorporate archiving into their email deployment model. If this refresh is done using an archiving facility like Metalogix Archive Manager, the organization can benefit from sustained operations without frequent infrastructure upgrades and from significantly less complicated and time-consuming operations on the part of both administrators and end-users. Copyright 2012 Evaluator Group Inc. Page 8