Don't Be Handcuffed to a Messaging Vendor by Your E-mail Archiving System

Yesterday's article by InfoWorld called "The Blazing Trail of Open Source Development" affirmed the statements that our folks have been saying for years - that choosing an archiving system that integrates with a commercial mail application locks you to that vendor. The article states that "critical enterprise data ends up stored on e-mail servers" and "When those servers are based on proprietary software, companies are at the mercy of a single vendor to orchestrate e-mail storage, retrieval, search, archiving, backup, integration and management."

Archiving is by nature the storing of data for long term retention and convenient accessiblity. Choosing an e-mail archiving system that integrates with a given commercial product (e.g., MS Exchange) puts your long-term access to extremely valuable e-mail content in jeopardy. On the other hand, the unnamed writer of the article writes that "A messaging system based on open protocols and open code gives customers assurance that they'll be able to access their data when they need it, over the long term".

The article further explains that although the two big commercial vendors continue to dominate the messaging market, "a number of attractive alternatives have begun to appear" and "development communities will increasingly allow those systems to compete with the proprietary stalwarts, not just on price and availability, but also on features".

Archiving is for the long-term. Even if you're not willing to look at open source messaging systems now, at least keep your future options open by avoiding archiving applications that are locked to a vendor.

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Why iSCSI for E-mail Archiving?

Here's why I believe that iSCSI storage is a good fit for e-mail archiving, even for small organizations:

1. Scalability

There isn't a CIO out there who can accurately predict what his/her email storage demands will be a year down the road. Year after year growth in e-mail is both significant and unpredictable. Average message sizes are growing from 30% to 75% annually and message volume growth is in the same range. With this uncertainty in requirements CIO must choose enough storage but without wasting scarce IT budgets on too much unused capacity.

Some iSCSI targets offer the ability to buy storage as you need it. Lefthand Networks for example refers to the ability of its SAN/iQ product to "scale-out". This lets customers archive mail to a single mount point and just add more storage as they need it. This fits particularly well with e-mail archiving because it removes the guess work on storage capacity. Noone knows how much e-mail storage they'll need in a year or two, but with iSCSI solutions like SAN/iQ, you don't need to guess at it.


2. Storage centralization

Keep in mind that the purpose of e-mail archiving is two-fold - a place to store e-mail messages for the long-term while still being readily accessible to users. If users can't access the archive, it's not an archive - it's a backup.

When incremental storage is deployed using IP SAN software like SAN/iQ it is seamlessly added to a single storage pool. Multiple storage volumes appear to the archiving application, and more importantly to the user, as a single message store. The physical location of the message is transparent to the user. The user executes a simple search for a message, views a message, or restores it to their inbox, all without regard for its storage location.

A word of caution however: You need to have a good index/search tool.

3. Low cost

One of the best things about iSCSI storage, in particularly IP SANs - is that it is a highly scalable storage system priced for the SMB market. For example, MPC Computer's DataFRAME 240 IP SAN with 6 TB of storage has a list price of only $30,000 - a pultry $5 per GB. And there are smaller, less expensive models available, too. Because of its inherent scalability, IP SANs let you start with what you can afford and only invest more when you need additional capacity.