E-mail Challenges Storage Environments

Organizations are flooded with data. Volumes of e-mail and documents are routinely generated over the course of daily operations. Product and sales personnel share pricing and competitive information online, and buyers and suppliers transact business over e-mail.

The growth in unstructured

data and the increasing reliance on e-mail for communication and document exchange are key contributors to the increasing importance of data protection and management. The storage, management and discovery of e-mail have become a priority not only in IT departments but also in boardrooms around the world. Legal and regulatory requirements for records retention and availability have put e-mail and content archiving issues at the forefront of a growing number of organizations' information lifecycle-management strategies.

So how do businesses turn a seemingly unmanageable and ever-growing mass of e-mail records into a corporate asset, while ensuring those records are readily accessible in the event of an e-discovery request?

Today's storage and server infrastructures were not designed to accommodate the long-term retention of e-mail. Traditional backup and recovery is often too time-consuming, limited and complex. After all, backups serve as secondary copies of data; as such, they were built to help companies recover data damaged as the result of human error or another event.

While e-mail is typically backed up every day or week, it is historically backed up to tape and then stored at a remote location. In the event of a disaster, these tapes are invaluable, but they fall short of meeting the need for rapid information discovery.

In addition, for Microsoft Exchange users, storing e-mail records in PST files-local e-mail caches on each individual user's desktop or laptop-is not an adequate option for managing the demands of large-scale corporate e-mail. PST files are easily corrupted, even as they increase storage requirements and offer no centralized view of their location, ownership or migration status. Yet, companies continue to move e-mails into PST files for retention, opting for a costly migration process that is difficult to manage and time-consuming to perform.

ASSESS YOUR NEEDS

Therefore, organizations should consider addressing their e-mail retention and management needs now, in order to meet regulatory requirements and demands for electronic discovery. The first step is determining which e-mails should be retained, and for how long. Establishing an appropriate records-retention-and-deletion policy typically requires the input of in-house or outside legal counsel to ensure that relevant industry regulations and laws are considered.

Archiving differs from backups. Archiving refers to the process of automatically moving e-mail messages and attachments off the e-mail servers to a secure, yet fully searchable online repository. Implementing an archiving system enables organizations to exploit that archived data on demand. It also provides the ability to move older data that is no longer needed on a short-term basis to less-expensive, long-term storage, and dispose of it when permissible. By establishing and leveraging such a framework, organizations can increase their operational efficiency and decrease their business risk.

E-mail archiving systems enable the discovery of content held within e-mail, file systems and collaborative environments, while also helping reduce storage costs and simplifying management. By automating the archiving process, an e-mail archiving system also obviates the need for employees to have to pick and choose which messages and attachments to retain and for how long. Consequently, this increases the likelihood that important records are not accidentally deleted or lost.

With the growing use of instant messaging as a business tool in the corporate sector, the archiving system can also preserve these communications. Since many organizations are required to keep all forms of business communications, including e-mail and instant messages, for long periods of time to enable policies for corporate governance, the ability to archive multiple content types is vital.

Ensuring that a full range of content is automatically archived helps organizations increase operational efficiencies-but archived content should also be accessible. Business records should be available as part of regulatory actions or litigation processes. Moreover, they should be found quickly and securely, without disclosing other sensitive information.

To that end, organizations should be able to not only search the archive but also locate the correct set of content, make it available to authorized reviewers, and provide appropriate audit, tracking and reporting to illustrate due diligence. If organizations are unable to produce requested records, they may face penalties and fines.

When restored, data must be extracted for presentation in court. This process can take anywhere from days to weeks or months, depending on the size and scope of the discovery request. Flexible and automated discovery capabilities help reduce the cost of a single discovery by enabling reviewers to quickly target and pinpoint specific e-mail when it is needed as part of litigation, support, legal discovery or investigation.

Organizations can store, archive and index e-mail and attachments in a journal archive and use Web search tools to find content quickly and easily. Reviewers can mark and annotate items according to their defined marking scheme. Discoverable items can be exported for opposition or court-ready production.

Just as regulatory compliance is not simply about e-mail retention, reducing cost is not just about storage optimization. E-mail archiving and discovery policies and solutions enable organizations to archive and exploit critical information as needed, while also increasing efficiencies and reducing business risk.

As organizations increasingly rely on e-mail for daily business operations, and regulatory and legal requirements call for the long-term retention and rapid accessibility of messages, e-mail archiving and discovery tools and practices represent a cost-effective answer to the challenges of managing the information lifecycle.

Nick Mehta is senior director of product management at Symantec Corp., Cupertino, Calif.

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RELATED ARTICLE: Where ISCSI fits in.

by Todd Bundy

A variety of transport options are available for transmitting data among distributed facilities. Depending on factors such as cost requirements and the distances to be covered, an enterprise might consider deploying distributed-storage solutions over Internet protocol (IP), synchronous optical network/ synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) and/or wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transport networks.

Many small and medium-sized businesses are finding a solution for distributed storage in an emerging IP-based protocol, Internet small computer systems interface (iSCSI). In many cases, enterprises are turning to iSCSI to back up traffic that is not mission critical, as a complement to Fibre Channel applications running across SONET/SDH and WDM infrastructures.

IP, SONET/SDH or WDM-enhanced optical networks can transport an enterprise's storage traffic among distributed data vaults. Choosing which storage traffic to entrust to which transport option is dependent on a variety of factors, including cost requirements, the speeds of the storage applications to be networked, the mission-criticality of the traffic and the distances to be covered.

Packet-based IP is a cost-effective, simple option, and is widely deployed and well understood by enterprise IT managers. Enterprises can immediately leverage their existing IP networks to support iSCSI storage applications for backing up low-priority data over long distances.

iSCSI has its limitations, however, iSCSI header and commands must be added to the Ethernet packets being transported across a storage area network, and this introduces a protocol overhead that renders iSCSI's performance insufficient for runtime-sensitive, synchronous storage applications.

IP-based iSCSI storage networking should not be regarded as a replacement for Fibre Channel applications running through SONET/SDH gateways or across WDM-enhanced optical networks. The most sophisticated enterprise storage strategies will leverage all three transport options. For example, WDM can be relied on to provide reliable, transparent, protocol-agnostic connectivity between iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN islands, delivering optimal disaster-recovery and business-continuity capabilities, as well as cost-efficient storage and server utilization.

Todd Bundy is director of business development and alliances for ADVA Optical Networking. Mahwah. N.J.