Exchange email archival?

Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2008
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I've got a site with about 15 users using Exchange on SBS 2003.

They recently received a sales email advertising MailStore Archiver for Exchange, and they’ve now decided that they’d like to have an email archival system.

I’m trying to draw up a short list of options that are worth trialling. Any suggestions about what’s good, or more importantly bad, would be appreciated.
 
Soldato
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Exeter
I've looked at:

- Barracuda message archiver appliance. Pros: Reasonably cost effective, simple, supports stubbing, expandable. Cons: Lacking a few features, backup might be an issue
- GFI mail archiver. Pros: Cheap, as expandable as the server it resides on. Cons: No stubbing
- Messagelabs hosted archiving: Pros: Hosted, so no worries, some nice features and includes the security side of things. Cons: Expensive!

We're going for the Barracuda probably, just waiting for an eval unit
 
Associate
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We use mimecast as a hosted spam/virus filtering service, they also offer archiving (and importing of psts) but we dont use it.
 
Soldato
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I don't know if Symantec Enterprise Vault would fit your budget or size but if it does it seems to be the most popular one out there by far, great product.

Then EMC Emailxtender / Sourceone is an option.
 

ajf

ajf

Soldato
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Worcestershire, UK
We use GFI and have had no major issues with it using it with 300 users. It can be a bit slow when retrieving archived messages but seems reliable.
Support is also helpful whnewe have had questions.
 
Soldato
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It's so slow, but to be honest my opinion is probably very biased as some other fool installed it with the firebird database, it's just very laggy and I'm not a fan of the interface.
 
Associate
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We use barracuda, cheap and does the job including stubbing and retention polices. Good because you dont pay per mailbox - just 1 flat fee
 
Permabanned
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london
do not use symantec vault

i hate that software, has to be the worst software that you can unleash onto your emails, how many times i have seen it corrupt emails and it causes an IT support nightmare due to the client always failing. You are also unable to retrieve emails when using cache exchange mode on a laptop out of the office.

I would recommend buying more hard drive space for the exchange server and not archiving at all.
 
Soldato
OP
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I would recommend buying more hard drive space for the exchange server and not archiving at all.

This is effectively the situation I'm in.

With the very small number of users the overall storage requirements are never going to be a problem.

I'm more concerned with the size of individual mailboxes. I've got some users (management so you can't slap them) that regularly have 3GB+ in use.

There's presumably a point where performance will start to suffer? Unfortunately I haven't got any real idea about what that point would be.
 
Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2009
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14,814
Location
Exeter
Absolutely, performance will start to suffer, and just leaving them in the mailbox doesnt tick any regulatory boxes. Archives also give you a nice backup when someone wants a long lost email back.

Just leaving them in the mail store is a very bad suggestion indeed
 
Associate
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Bedfordshire
3GB, we have people that have 12+GB

Currently using Symantec Enterprise Vault - does the job but I haven't used any others to compare it with, wouldn't say it fits in with the budget of a 15 user SBS site.

As for the person saying it is always failing, the only issues we have are having to rebuild the index from time to time for users. As for not having access when offline you can have a vault cache that allows access to some archived mail offline
 
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