E-mail Archiving Where it Belongs - In the Storage Infrastructure

The natural evolution of what used to be called "network applications" is that, once it reaches a certain level of maturity, an application morphs into the infrastructure. Network routing for example used to be a separate network application on servers running the network operating system (NOS). But CISCO changed that when it introduced new easy-to-install and easy-to-maintain routers. From that point on, network routing and switching were no longer applications but a part of the network . In the early days of the LAN, file management and print services were also separate applications and they too have long since sunk into the infrastructure.

Because of the explosive growth of data and the need for longer-term retention over the past decade, storage management has been, and continues to be, one of the leading areas of IT corporate spending. To avoid the proliferation of independent storage silos, a properly deployed storage infrastructure should manage all data, independent of the application that created it.

To the corporate storage system, e-mail data should be just like any other data. Accordingly, the storage infrastructure should be capable of managing e-mail data without the need for special software applications. In other words, storing e-mail data should be infrastructure functionality and not a business application.

We're beginning to see the decades old evolutionary trend of applications morphing into the infrastructure now being applied to e-mail content. At last week's CeBit for example, QStar Technologies announced the capability of its general purpose SntryStr storage appliance to manage e-mail messages in the same way it manages other corporate data. What QStar calls "SntryML" (pronounced sentry mail) is effectively e-mail archiving functionality embedded within their storage appliance. Bravo QStar!