Which email archiving system do use use/recommend

[j3ll0]

Originally Posted by bsbozzy

Users mailbox has a 1.25GB limit, once they reach that they can no longer send, so they archive unneeded emails to a pst in their home share which is backed up each weeknight.

Is your file server storage cheaper to run and backup than your messaging storage?

[Chemix]

Originally Posted by Jai

I look after in excess of 150 seats that have been doing PST over LAN for over 4.5 years and not a single PST corrupt, even when server may have an issue, or faulty disk, or switch issue. This is even back with Outlook 2000 and even now with 2GB+ 2003 PSTs.

Whilst MS say this, and have for years, from what I have personally seen its a crock. I would setup new users weekly using this method. Cant trust users to backup their email, so I need to do it for them and this is the only reliable way as we only give them 30MB mailbox space.

JK

25K users with 120 sites, and with offices on 1 or 2mb WAN links, you'll find that PST on network absolutely slaughters the network, especially when you get marketing/sales offices that only have 10 or 12 users but are very heavy users of email, you'll get lots of issues.

[bsbozzy]

Originally Posted by j3ll0

Is your file server storage cheaper to run and backup than your messaging storage?

Yes, and it is a hell of alot easier aswell. Backing up/Restoring a pst vs Backing up/restoring a whole mail store is a hell of alot easier. Thats only a minor consideration though. With around 400 users and no SAN currently, we dont have shit loads of space on our exchange server, however 2 file server's have over 1TB each.

[j3ll0]

Originally Posted by bsbozzy

Yes, and it is a hell of alot easier aswell. Backing up/Restoring a pst vs Backing up/restoring a whole mail store is a hell of alot easier. Thats only a minor consideration though. With around 400 users and no SAN currently, we dont have shit loads of space on our exchange server, however 2 file server's have over 1TB each.

Space considerations I get. I'll take brick-levels over restoring a .pst any day of the week for ease of restoration though

Horses for courses, I guess. If it works for you, cool. Certainly wouldn't be the way I'd build an environment by design though.

[VR4hore]

Originally Posted by power

any idea what it's worth to purchase?

you've put it out there, got any more details on it??

I've also noticed no love for GFI, does anyone use this or know someone who does?

Wouldn't know about pricing, I just implement it. Not sure if the price point would be appropriate for your number of seats but who knows. If you're interested in finding out more I can probably arrange something.

[power]

i emailed them no response yet, they don't seem to keen on my business.

[Swathe]

End users here are encouraged to create their own PST files for redundancy reasons but some then exceed their profile space and can't log off.

[power]

Originally Posted by Swathe

End users here are encouraged to create their own PST files for redundancy reasons but some then exceed their profile space and can't log off.

haha, yeah i think PST's are totally out of the question for me - have been in contact with GFI (not GFI specifically but a reseller) and they seem to have a good product for small to medium size business.

Kind of wish someone could post some experiences on it.

[bsbozzy]

Originally Posted by j3ll0

Space considerations I get. I'll take brick-levels over restoring a .pst any day of the week for ease of restoration though

Horses for courses, I guess. If it works for you, cool. Certainly wouldn't be the way I'd build an environment by design though.

Not my design, its an existing thing which no one above me wants to change/spend time on/spend money on, so they get what they are given.

We keep monthly backups for years and do a daily backup which is overwritten the next month, i.e. day 4 tapes 1-4 are overwritten every 4th, we always have enough backups on hand.

[andys]

This week I rolled my own on a unix (FreeBSD) mail server with Ruby scripts, postgresql database, and a web app to search and display messages. No mailbox size limits, no archiving limits, no software license fees, plenty of free storage (10TB RAID for under $20k)

You asked :P

[tahpot]

Originally Posted by power

Organisation is less than 30 seat, SBS 2003/exchange/thin client/terminal server. Requirement is that users can easily search emails through Outlook 2003 and minimal hardware upgrade if possible.

How much is your total cost of licenses + implementation time + ongoing maintenance + hardware + backup utilities? Add it all up and then compare to $50/yr for Google Apps (GMail, Google Docs, Calendar) for 25G/user, plus the awsomeness of Gmail searching.

[Chemix]

Originally Posted by tahpot

How much is your total cost of licenses + implementation time + ongoing maintenance + hardware + backup utilities? Add it all up and then compare to $50/yr for Google Apps (GMail, Google Docs, Calendar) for 25G/user, plus the awsomeness of Gmail searching.

Say hello to increased bandwidth usage, only 90 day retention on backups, no offline browsing of email and laughable SLA definitions (10 minutes is not considered an outage). Products like symantec enterprise vault use the altavista seach engine for searching through the vaults, enterprise vault can also do file and sharepoint archiving.

[tahpot]

Originally Posted by Chemix

Say hello to increased bandwidth usage, only 90 day retention on backups, no offline browsing of email and laughable SLA definitions (10 minutes is not considered an outage). Products like symantec enterprise vault use the altavista seach engine for searching through the vaults, enterprise vault can also do file and sharepoint archiving.

Increased bandwidth usage? I don't think so, depends on your usage scenario and even then I'd say it's much of a muchness. If you want to continue using exchange you can connect via POP and download the message. If you want to use the GMail interface you don't download the message and just view the ones you want and download the attachments you want.

90 retention? Don't know where you get that from. Google Apps offers 25Gig / user (more available) and has no timelimit on storage.

Laughable SLA? If an exchange server goes down, staff have to detect it, call someone, get them to come out, identify the problem and then fix it. They're charging you straight away and they have to troubleshoot the problem and then fix it. I'd take Google's engineers to maintain a system over that arrangement any day all as part of my annual usage fee.

[Chemix]

Originally Posted by tahpot

Increased bandwidth usage? I don't think so, depends on your usage scenario and even then I'd say it's much of a muchness. If you want to continue using exchange you can connect via POP and download the message. If you want to use the GMail interface you don't download the message and just view the ones you want and download the attachments you want.

90 retention? Don't know where you get that from. Google Apps offers 25Gig / user (more available) and has no timelimit on storage.

Laughable SLA? If an exchange server goes down, staff have to detect it, call someone, get them to come out, identify the problem and then fix it. They're charging you straight away and they have to troubleshoot the problem and then fix it. I'd take Google's engineers to maintain a system over that arrangement any day all as part of my annual usage fee.

All your internal mail that you send now has to go out to the cloud and come back in if someone views it. So if a user sends out a 1meg newsletter email to everyone, 29 people download the 1meg newsletter. If you don't have some kind of proxy with caching, your link will probably be saturated.

90 day retention means if someone deletes and email then 3 months later needs to recover it, you're down the toilet. This also means that if you need to keep backups for 7 years, it is not usable for your company.

Exchange isn't that hard to fix, and if it does down and you call someone out to fix it, or your server support fix it, it can be up in a short period of time. If Google's services are flapping, every 10 minutes for a few minutes, they will not fix it as it's not considered an outage.

It maybe good for tiny businesses, but it really doesn't scale very well and is very limited on features.

[tahpot]

Originally Posted by Chemix

All your internal mail that you send now has to go out to the cloud and come back in if someone views it. So if a user sends out a 1meg newsletter email to everyone, 29 people download the 1meg newsletter. If you don't have some kind of proxy with caching, your link will probably be saturated.

This is certainly true and if your organisation does this often you're going to be behind. This is however an abnormal use of email and should be frowned upon. If you are sending a newsletter, why is it 1meg? If you are trying to share a document, that should be via an internal document management system not email.

Originally Posted by Chemix

90 day retention means if someone deletes and email then 3 months later needs to recover it, you're down the toilet. This also means that if you need to keep backups for 7 years, it is not usable for your company.

This is easily solved if no-one deletes anything and just uses the archive feature - but could be hard to police. If you have a legal requirement to keep backups for 7 years Google Apps may not be an appropriate solution for your organisation. It's not going to fix everyone's needs.

Originally Posted by Chemix

Exchange isn't that hard to fix, and if it does down and you call someone out to fix it, or your server support fix it, it can be up in a short period of time. If Google's services are flapping, every 10 minutes for a few minutes, they will not fix it as it's not considered an outage.

Google's services don't flap every 10 minutes. In fact I have never encountered an outage - but I have heard of them occurring overseas. "They will not fix it as it's not considered an outage" -- they fix it immediately, even if you're asleep. For no extra charge.

Originally Posted by Chemix

It maybe good for tiny businesses, but it really doesn't scale very well and is very limited on features.

It doesn't scale well? It's one of the largest email services in the world. It's also one of the services with the largest number of features (Integretated calendaring with auto-email & SMS, Collaborative documents etc. etc.)

It certainly isn't suitable for every business, but I would guestimate around 90% of business would end up with a much better product for a much better TCO by using Google Apps.