Over the past few years, e-mail has created numerous challenges for organizations; these have been represented by three "waves": Storage, Compliance and Enterprise E-mail Intelligence. The storage wave was focused on managing the exponential growth of e-mail and the impact this had on email storage, and resulted in solutions that stored e-mail more efficiently than mainstream e-mail systems.

More recently, and driven by legislation, the compliance wave has highlighted the need to capture and provide easy access to e-mail messages. In addition to storage and compliance requirements, organizations also need to make use of their e-mail data on an ongoing basis. Knowledge needs to be shared across users and groups, while lines of business applications also need access to up-to-date e-mail data.

We call this Enterprise E-mail Intelligence. This third wave addresses all storage and compliance requirements, while providing a flexible platform for the future.

"Archiving" -- Misunderstood and Poorly Executed

"Archiving involves indexing content such that it can be retrieved easily at a later time using a keyword search. Anything else is just backup, and ineffectual backup at that".

As networked storage becomes more ubiquitous, the need to manage where the data is stored and to ensure that it can be moved around within the storage environment becomes increasingly important. However, as this process moves up the agenda for IT departments, the understanding of the differences between different techniques and limitations becomes ever more important.

Data migration, backup, disaster recovery and archiving may all seem to merge into the single discipline of data movement but each has a different role to play. What differentiates each of these is the business drivers behind them. For instance, data migration is about the bulk movement of data from one data storage resource to another to achieve a particular outcome. This tends to be a data movement which is based on a ‘one off’, project-based requirement, rather than a regular feature of day to day Data Centre activity. Disaster recovery on the other hand, is deployed as a form of risk mitigation, basically a form of insurance against a catastrophic event depriving an organisation of access to its data. Where disaster recovery is concerned, data will be in an almost constant state of change as remote facilities are constantly updated.

By contrast, Backup is about restoring lost, deleted or corrupted data to a known good state. In the real world, most cases are about restoring individual files rather than complete system volumes. Backup does not try to keep up with a constantly changing set of data but relies on a ‘snapshot’ of a point in time which can vary from hours (using virtualised disk techniques) to days and weeks using more conventional tape backup.

Finally, archiving is about the long term retention of data which rarely if ever changes and any changes which do occur tend to be deletions of data no longer required. The characteristic which defines archiving is therefore the unchanging nature of the data.