With data burdens for organizations increasing at dizzying rates, storage management has become more important than ever. That wasn’t been lost on Microsoft in its continuing development of Exchange Server 2010. The software maker has applied a new philosophy to how the application handles storage. It takes into account the declining price of storage and the pressure to improve performance across the storage infrastructure. It embraces using direct-attached storage instead of disk arrays, continuous replication to spare servers instead of RAID or clustering and cheap disk arrays as a substitute for tape backups.

Exchange 2010, as did Exchange 2007, has improved its handling of input/output loads for a given number of simultaneous users. One way it does that is by shelving a technique for storing copies of email messages that Microsoft has used in all previous versions of Exchange. In those versions, Exchange tries to store all copies of a message at a single location on disk. That saves disk space but reduces performance. Exchange 2010 stores copies wherever there’s free space. That may eat up more space, but Microsoft felt the performance improvement was worth it. Those kinds of improvements in Exchange 2010 opens the door for IT departments to use more economical alternatives to traditional and expensive solutions, such as substituting serial attached storage for network attached storage.

Continue reading Exchange 2010 has some storage twists

Ten years ago we measured mailbox sizes in megabytes.  A 20mb mailbox was adequate.  A 100mb mailbox was a luxury.

Today we measure mailbox sizes in gigabytes.  A single message in today’s email communications could easily consume the entire mailbox quota of a decade ago.  We’re sending more email, bigger email, and keeping it longer.

Email server products such as Microsoft Exchange Server have responded to this growth in storage needs with support for more processing power, more efficient database schemas, and improved performance on storage hardware.

In fact, most of the storage performance gains of the last 4 years have been in the efficiency of the Exchange Server product itself, not in the performance capabilities of storage hardware.  Hard disks are getting bigger, but they aren’t getting faster.

As we become more reliant in the ability to retain and access email data quickly it is no surprise that we are storing more and more of it in our mailboxes.  This increase in email storage reveals some new bottlenecks in IT systems – the ability to adequately back the data up.

Backup Challenges

Backups are experiencing similar growing pains to disk storage.  Tape speeds and capacities increase through new generations of the technologies, but when disk speeds and network speeds don’t increase with them there is only so much throughput that you can achieve.  Eventually many larger enterprises reach a stage in which a nightly, full backup of the Exchange system is not possible within the backup window.

Three key technologies have surfaced to help enterprises manage these growth issues with email storage:

• Archiving
• Synthetic Backups
• De-Duplication

Archiving

Email archiving usually involves moving older, less frequently accessed data from the primary storage to a secondary storage system.  The secondary storage system may be built in to the email server, such as Exchange Server 2010’s archiving feature, or it might come in the form of a third party product that integrates with Exchange. Continue reading 3 Technologies for Improving Backup Efficiency for Growing Exchange Environments

Started in 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project was created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market.  EDRM is a great reference tool to develop guidelines and standards for ediscovery consumers and service providers.  EDRM helps reduce the cost, time and manual work associated with ediscovery.

Referencing the  accompanying EDRM diagram on their web site, the 8 areas lay out a structured foundation for facilitating the implementation of an archiving software solution.  This makes life easier with providing all the players standard guidelines, as part of the archiving and information retrieval process related to legal and government requests.

We will cover a cursory overview of EDRM.

Information Management
Getting your electronic house in order to mitigate risk and expenses should electronic discovery become an issue. This covers the initial creation of electronically stored information all the way through its final disposition.

Identification
This refers to the process of learning the location of all data which a company has a duty to preserve and potentially disclose in an upcoming  legal proceeding.

Preservation
Preservation for electronic discovery has become a complicated, multi-faceted, steadily-changing concept in recent years.  Certain suggested standards and guidelines have been emerging to provide checklists for those preparing to respond to electronic requests for production.

Collection
The acquisition of electronic information, which is  tagged as potentially relevant in the identification phase. Continue reading EDRM Guides Archive Strategy

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with an associate and email administrator in New York City named Lisa Bruno.  She and her team are involved in a Lotus Notes-to-Microsoft Exchange migration.  Lisa shared some interesting insights.  Having recently migrated to Exchange 2007, one of the many questions we find is ‘what to use for backup?’.  Within Exchange you can set a “Local Continuous Replication”.   It takes an exact replica of the storage group.  Now the question is, since Local Continuous Replication is set do we need third party backup software?   In response to that question, we determined that yes we still need a backup solution.  By no means should LCR be considered as the only form of backup.  LCR also compliments any implemented archiving solutions by adding an extra utility for maintaining data integrity. Data integrity is crucial to just that one instance when archived data must be retrieved due to a legal inquiry. While it does give that option and helps in recovering quickly, it should not be the end of all.

Continue reading Microsoft Exchange LCR Compliments Archiving