The Economics of a "Network Message Store"

Using a NAS device as a message store not only frees the mail server of much of its storage load, it's a fraction of the cost. You can purchase a 1 TB NAS for less than $5,000.00 or $5.00 per GB. Most users generate, according to The Radicati Group, about 20 MB of email per day (100 MB per week or 5 GB per year). This means that the cost of storing a full year's worth of e-mail is only about $25 per employee, assuming no deletions. The cost of storing this same amount of e-mail on a commercial mailserver like MS Exchange is likely to be over $500 per user (approximately $100 per GB).

This kind of NAS economics is only achievable when storing e-mail messages as files. NAS and other network file systems are particularly well suited to file storage because of their relatively simple file-based directory structure. Compare this with the extensive overhead that a database adds to a mail-server message store.

But how do you access these archived messages without an index? You need an index but the scalability here comes from keeping the index separate from the NAS-stored files (e.g., on an appliance). The message metadata in the index includes pointers to the message-files. Because each record in the database is very small (e.g, 500 bytes), a small database can support thousands of users and provide each of them with access to millions of messages in the NAS. This architecture offers the benefits of inexpensive and scalable network file storage for indexed messages.

The biggest cost of mail server storage however is the cost, in both time and inconvenience, of back-ups. Although the messages stored in the NAS should be regularly backed up, backing up these files is far simpler and less costly than backing up a mail server.

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E-mail Archiving Appliances - A $2 Billion Industry?

Messaging analyst firm, The Radicati Group, predicts that demand for e-mail archiving solutions will grow from it's current size of about $500 million to a wopping $4.4 billion in vendor revenue by the Year 2009.

The Forrester Research estimate that SMB's represent 44% of all IT spending, combined with the preference SMBs have demonstrated for the simplicity of low maintenance appliance-based solutions, and the result is a market demand for e-mail archiving appliances that could reach $2 billion in annual vendor revenue by 2009.

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Morgan Stanley Fine Reflects that E-mail is a Business Record

Yesterday, Morgan Stanley issued a press release offering up a fine of $15 million to resolve an investigation over its failure to retain e-mail messages. The same firm earlier in 2005 received a court judgement against it (where missing e-mail messages was a key contributing factor) for $1.58 billion and is currently also facing other "related" charges with NASD.

This announcement and others like it are significant and provide business leaders of all sizes and types with some critical warnings. Namely, that a policy of automatic deletion of e-mail messages is a dangerous one because it could be tantamount to willful destruction of business records, and that the cost of recovering e-mail messages must be attrociously high (if the message do in fact still exist) for Morgan Stanley to offer up such a huge penalty.

But, most important of all in my opinion is that judgements like these are establishing a new watermark level of best practices for e-mail record retention, a benchmark that global business leaders must adhere. Since so much business is now conducted by electronic communication and because it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish messages that have business-record-value from those that don't, it is becoming clear that proper governance will include retention of all e-mail messages for longer periods than has previously been the case - possibly indefinately.

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Do Businesses Want E-mail Archiving or More Scalable Messages Stores?

Consider this popular quote from Harvard Business School professor, Thomas Levitt: "People don't want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole."

For a variety of reasons, including the high profile FUD of compliance, e-mail messages are now no longer considered temporary. Most mail-server message stores are incapable of scaling to the size that's needed and because the major messaging vendors have been unwilling to open up their information stores , e-mail archiving applications ("quarter-inch drill") emerged.

The classic e-mail archiving application relies on the mail-server message store for short term storage but moves messages of a specified age to a more economical and more scalable repository elsewhere on the network.

But, why should messages have to be moved? Messaging architectures ideally should provide the option of deploying the type and size of repository or database a customer wants. If the messaging vendor's information stores were affordably scalable (the "quarter inch hole"), we wouldn't need e-mail archiving (the "quarter inch drill").

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The Difference Between an Archive and a Backup

Ask a hundred IT people to define Backup and Archive and you'll be surprised how many different, conflicting definitions you get. Many see the two as synonomous while others consider an Archive to be the result of a Backup. Without common definitions and clear distinctions how can we as a community achieve break-through technological advances? If we can't define the terms clearly how are we going to communicate effectively with not-so-technical stakeholders like corporate executives?

Here's how Yahoo defines an Archive: A long-term storage area, often on magnetic tape, for backup copies of files or for files that are no longer in active use. No wonder we're having such difficulty finding common ground. In my opinion, the best way to understand (and communicate) the difference between a Backup and an Archive is by emphasizing their different outcomes. In a nutshell, the purpose of an Archive is information accessibility while the purpose of a Backup is business recovery.

Along these lines, Wikipedia offers a pretty good distinction...

Archive refers to a collection of records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept. In computing, an archive is a file containing many other files.

Backup in computer engineering refers to the copying of data for the purpose of having an additional copy of an original source. If the original data is damaged or lost, the data may be copied back from that source, a process which is known as Data recovery or Restore. The "data" in question may be either data as such, or stored program code, both of which are treated the same by the backup software.

For what it's worth, here are my definitions of the two:

Archive: A user-accessible repository of information that is not confined by the age of its content.

Backup: A snapshot of files and data that can restore a system to a previous operational state.

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