Archive for the ‘Email Archiving’ Category

I just got back from the ILTA show in Las Vegas. I had booth duty most of the time so have little opportunity to scout the show but had several interesting conversations with attendees as they came into the Iron Mountain booth.

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across organizations. Grid technologies allow organizations to change the way organizations can deploy and resolve complex archiving deployments. The Iron Mountain NearPoint Multi-Node Grid Architecture is the most scalable architecture in the email archive industry and is provided standard in NearPoint. Utilizing a super-scalar or super-pipelined grid, NearPoint can support systems ranging in size from 100 mailboxes to tens of thousands of mailboxes. A hot-plug modular architecture allows servers and storage to be added or taken away as required, with no downtime. This capability benefits large Exchange environments as well as medium-size environments with high peak demands. Archive storage capacity grows on demand automatically, and default configuration and wizard-driven menus simplify deployment and management.

It is of my opinion that there are almost zero reasons to legitimately have PST files in a corporate environment and I have been speaking on this topic a few times in the past.  Many people underestimate how bad the problem / infestiation of PST files is in their organization and its erradication can be a long and tricky process actually unless you have adequate tools available for you like Iron Mountain NearPoint and its PST Archiving Option.  On August 10th I will present the latest on how to plan to get rid of PST files.  Learn everything that you need to know about how to tackle such a project.  You can register for the webinar here.

I’ve been in this industry for most of the last decade now and have seen pretty much all the ways archiving products can and have been deployed in organizations. From small to Fortune 500, they all are slightly different in the way their internal IT is being managed and used.  Archiving products can have a big impact on your infrastructure with requirements and there is one particular piece that I’d like to highlight in this post that many forget.

Time and time again we see news stories and legal case writes ups where it has become obvious employees still have no idea that an email is not a private communication. I find most employees, even corporate legal department types, still consider an email is like a verbal conversation in a parking lot; once its ended, it doesn’t exist anymore (unless it was recorded).

I recently ran across a few articles on  U.K. developer CPC Group Ltd and Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co, which is the real-estate investment arm of Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund. The decision was that Qatari Diar wrongfully backed out of a deal to redevelop London’s landmark Chelsea Barracks site after the plan was opposed by Prince Charles, a judge ruled.  

Snapshotting archivable data to your archive

A while back I already wrote about this briefly, but I’d like to bring it up again simply because the technology and idea behind it is so fascinating.
Users of NetApp and Microsoft Exchange Iron Mountain’s newly-acquired NearPoint™ solution for archiving, accessing and protecting email. InterVision’s customers can
enjoy high performance, manageability and lower operating costs by combining leading technology from NetApp and Iron Mountain in a single integrated solution for managing
Microsoft Exchange.

Over the last two years, the trend has been to bring some or all of the eDiscovery process in-house, mainly to save money…large amounts of money. This movement to bring eDiscovery in-house has risks associated with it, the risk of not fully being able to effectively meet all the process requirements i.e. not finding/recognizing all ESI that could be responsive or privileged. Many organizations have tried to bring eDiscovery in-house by relying on their current infrastructure solutions.

The newly launched Dell DX Object Storage Platform is an integrated hardware and software solution designed to efficiently access, store and distribute billions of files and other digital content. With the NearPoint solution, the unified content management offering will help organizations reduce the costs and risks of managing unstructured data from Microsoft Exchange.

An email archiving appliance should not just capture sent and received email messages on some unknown storage device. If you need to archive your email, be sure to look at all your organizations requirements; storage management, eDiscovery, compliance, user productivity, and disaster recovery.