3rd Party Solutions
Back in the olden days you had to get a 3rd party solution to help with Single Instance Storage (SIS). The object was to keep the Exchange mailbox database stores small. Then the SIS storage area transformed into an Email Archive some Legal Eagle could rummage through. This was all easy to justify since storage was sky high in price and Exchange stores took forever to backup and restore, blah, blah, blah. We all know those stories.Exchange Personal Archives
Then Exchange Personal Archive enters the playground. This is meant for a user to just move their existing mail to a secondary mailbox. That's different from the 3rd party solutions which replace the message with a Stub or Shortcut. The Personal Archive removes the message from the mailbox, keeping it's size down. There are a lot of benefits to having less items in the mailbox and having policies for auto archiving. But it doesn't resolve the issue of space. You have to put that secondary mailbox somewhere. It will still take up space.Cheap Storage
Add "Cheap Storage" to the playground and now you got a real confusion! You can get super responsive storage, storage that compresses the data to half it's original size. All for a fraction of the cost of the Olden Days storage.So what?
Given all these choices what's an Exchange Administrator to do? Storage costs are going down. And 3rd party licensing fees go up. Then those pesky maintenance fees. Sheesh! It's enough to start thinking storage is cheaper than any 3rd party archiving solution. You know what? In many cases, it might be!Please sir, may I have "None of the above?"
We asked ourselves one important question: "Who controls the email?" That question may seem very easy to answer, but think about it. Are you a company subject to Sarbanes or HIPAA or some such? Then the answer may be "The Company " If you don't fall under that umbrella, then the control may be in the users hands.I'm not talking about ownership. "The Company" owns the data for sure. "The Company" may even have policies in place that limit, by date, how much data a user can have. But the user controls how long the allowed data lives. I may delete a message tomorrow, or I may elect to keep it forever. Many users reply on CYA and keep everything forever. You know, "Just in case."
Where I work we have many Email projects coming together: PST Migration, Email Archiving, Discovery, to name a few. Retention was a big discussion. One executive wanted to be certain that we never kept anything the user did not keep. If the user deletes it, we need to make sure we don't keep it.
We needed a new product that could help with all this. We decided (well, the "Powers That Be" decided) we don't need to keep backups of any email for more than two weeks and any historical data was decided by the user. (We don't have any time limits on mail, that is a battle for another time.)
So any email discovery via an Email Archive was out. We suddenly did not need that product for that reason anymore. And storage was so cheap, it was not a problem to throw 16T at the mail system. Piece of cake. We suddenly did not need the product to compress the data anymore either.
Now it's just a matter of moving the archived data back into the mailboxes for 25,000 users. I'll be busy for a while. I'll just look at it as job security.
Issues we face
We started moving users PST files into an Personal Archive because they were crashing the file servers with their 30,000 PST files. In those PST files were messages which are shortcuts to messages that were really in the Email Archive. And we put all those messages into the Personal Archive of the user.I have yet to find a 3rd party archiving solution that can reach a secondary mailbox and replace mail there with a shortcut. I hear you asking ; "Why would you want to?" -- Because you also may want to the reverse: Replace the shortcut with the original message.
As I embark on this new bigger than the universe project I will post from time to time challenges we face. The first one is to replace all the stubs in all the mailbox with the original message. Then move on to the Personal Archive. Not sure about that as yet.
This blog is about powershell. In the next post I'll show how I used powershell to help me find, keep track of users, and find potential problem users. Creating many databases, finding the smallest database, etc... Lots of work to do .
