Exchange Storage Management for the new decade
Exchange Storage management was what triggered the rapid uprise in email archiving tools in the beginning of the 2000. It was primarily caused by the limited end user mailbox sizes that was caused by the limitations in storage, software and overall cost associated with it. In the years after, organizations embraced stubbing as a means to clean out end users mailboxes in an attempt to keep storage costs in control.
Now, 10 years later it is my opinion that you should seriously look at another alternative way to perform storage management. Mailboxes have gotten bigger, drives have gotten larger and people send and receive more email than ever. This means that the use case scenario of a mailbox has changed also. I always describe storage management on a mailbox like how you deal with your tax records at home. Valuable content, but not something you look at every day.
Stubbed storage management can be described as this:
1. You have all of your tax records on the kitchen table
2. You keep the last 2 years on the kitchen table
3. For all remaining years you put a post-it note on the table for each IRS return telling where you can find it.
Now .. the chances are that you will never ever look at this content again and the same is true for email. The chances that you actually look at an email or search for one that is older than 1 year is really really slim. Therefor I am suggesting potentially taking a different approach to storage management:
1. Leave all content in Exchange that is younger than 1 year and enable full data capture with an archiving solution
2. Anything older, delete it from Exchange (after all .. its in the archive)
You have one less major component you need to maintain in your Exchange environment with this setup which is the whole stubbing part.
