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Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 : Getting Started with Email Archiving - Industry Best Practices

8/2/2014 4:00:14 AM

Organizations that are planning to deploy an archiving system in their environment soon realize that the deployment can be a daunting task. Having been in this industry for many years now, we've seen people doing things right and doing things wrong, and doing something wrong can result in some serious trouble (the worst is jail time).

Email archiving is a critical application for driving down the cost of managing email for corporate governance, litigation support, and regulatory compliance.

1. Storage Management

One of the main reasons that many organizations want to use archiving is storage management. The offloading of old email messages to cheaper storage makes sense, and we always describe this as keeping your IRS tax records on the kitchen table. You don't keep your IRS records on the table forever; you file them away where you have easy access to them. In the years that we've been working with and deploying archiving solutions, one thing has stood out when it comes to storage management: 99.9 percent of email older than six months is never accessed again and then you start to wonder why you keep them on your Exchange server.

Most administrators mistakenly think that the performance of the Exchange database is related to the size of the database or the size of the mailbox. The Knowledgebase article 905803 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905803) describes how Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and 2007 users experience poor performance when they work with a folder that contains many items on a server that is running Exchange Server 2007, Exchange Server 2003, or Exchange 2000 Server. The issue is caused because Outlook must perform several operations against the Exchange server to retrieve the contents of a folder, and the more items there are in a folder, the more time it will take to respond to the requests. The reason for this is restricted views; see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535025.aspx to learn more about this topic. While the article doesn't particularly mention Exchange 2010, it does apply to this release as well. The number of items per folder at which performance degradation starts to take place has now been raised to around 100,000 items per folder excluding third-party products, so these issues will be a lot less. You can help avoid the performance degradation in Outlook by managing the number of items in heavily used folders, including inbox, sent items, and calendars.

Archiving solutions reduce the storage footprint, but traditionally administrators will only perform archiving because they want to allow end users to have transparent access to data. When that happens, you will run into the item limit counts, because even though the stubbed archived messages are only a few kilobytes in size, they count toward the item limits.

A few storage management options are available, and we'd like to go over two of them that have worked at organizations in the past:


Time Based

With this option you perform archive data pretty much from day 1, but you don't create stubs in the mailbox; instead, you delete all data from the mailbox that's older than a specific age. The philosophy behind this approach is so you don't possibly confuse the end user with stubbed or archived messages. The time frame in which you want to delete the older data depends on how users use email in your organization, but deleting anything older than six months or a year is generally a safe time frame. You have to realize that even though you delete it from the mailbox, the data is in the archiving system, so end users can get access to the data if they need to do so. In some situations, however, organizations deploy an organizational archive and do not allow end users to access the data.


Stub and Time Based

This option combines the first one—deleting data older than six months or a year—with stubbing or archiving messages. This means that you can squeeze out a bit more storage savings by replacing the larger emails that are younger than six months or so.

We can't tell you exactly what will work in your environment; however, don't create a stubbing policy that acts on data that is younger than a few days. Not only would that create frustration for your end users, but it would also result in data ping-pong as end users would constantly want to restore archived data to their mailbox.

2. Importing PSTs

PSTs are notoriously bad for your environment. We often compare them to those pesky blackberries in your garden that take over the entire yard if you don't keep them in line. Most administrators know what PST files are because we've been using them daily since we started to use Exchange and Outlook. Archiving these days has almost become a standard practice as part of a process to get the rest of the messaging data under centralized management. It has been nearly 15 years since the first version of Exchange Server (4.0) was released, and many things that we have available nowadays in Exchange we take for granted.

Two versions of PST files are available. The most common and current version, known as the Unicode version, became available with Office 2003 and replaced the "original" PST file version. The main difference is that the first-generation PST file has a 2 GB hardcoded limit and the Unicode file has a theoretical 32 TB file size limit. In the real world, the Unicode PST file could cause performance degradation beyond 5 GB in file size if you do not have adequate performing hardware. Beyond 10 GB, according to Microsoft, you will encounter short pauses on almost all hardware (see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968009 for more details).

The fact that you didn't have any centralized management tools available played a major role in the sprawl of PST files. For more than a decade, users controlled the creation and location of PST files. As you would expect, this has caused problems. A company we worked with reported that they had close to 300 TB of data in PST files that were spread over desktops, laptops, servers, and backup tapes. The PST file storage far exceeded the storage allocated and available to their messaging system, resulting in major headaches. The company couldn't even bring PST files back into Exchange but had to bring the data under centralized management.

In such a situation, an archiving system can make your life easier. To comply with laws and regulations, you can't simply ignore and delete PST files. It fascinates us that organizations often spend a small fortune on protecting their messaging infrastructure with data leak prevention software to block sensitive data from leaving the organization unchecked. By forgetting about PST files, they might have closed one door, but they have forgotten to close a major security leak. One of the most common ways for end users to take their mailbox data with them is to simply export all the contents of their mailbox to a PST file and store it on a thumb drive or even MP3 player. They then can walk out the door with your company's sensitive information, contracts, and IP, all unchecked.

Even if you have managed to retain the information in your infrastructure, the cost of storing data in PST files is enormous. The file format itself is so bloated that it uses more storage than if the data was kept in the Exchange database.

So how do you eradicate PST files from your environment? We recommend implementing a multistep process:


1. Write a project plan.

For smaller companies, writing a project plan might not be as important, but for larger organizations such a plan will come in handy. A project plan allows you to prepare and think about exceptions that you didn't consider. For instance, what are you going to do with data from employees who have left your organizations? How are you going to handle password-protected PST files? A good plan will save you time.


2. Prevent further growth of the problem.

Microsoft has finally made some good Microsoft system management (Group Policy Object) policies available, which allows you to restrict users from creating PST files. You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=78161. Use them. We love, for instance, that you now have the option Prevent Users From Adding New Content To PST Files. This option still allows end users to open their PST files but prevents them from adding any new content.


3. Discover all existing PST files.

This task probably will take up the most time as you will have to find all the files on your network. If you run scripts to do this, ensure that you don't do an all-out search as it will saturate your network with network traffic. The reason why it takes such a long time is because you'll find PST files on servers, tapes, laptops, and workstations. Think about how you are going to deal with people who work remotely.


4. Bring PST data into an archive.

Bringing PST data into an archive allows you to bring the data back under your control. One of the reasons why you shouldn't bring it into Exchange directly is because there is a good chance that you might not have the required storage available. A big advantage is that if the data is in an archive, it allows you to set retention and gives you additional benefits when it comes to eDiscovery, risk management, and early case assessment.


5. Give end users access to their archived PSTs.

Taking away PST files from end users and not giving them access to their own data is the quickest way to start a users' revolt. Give end users access to the archived data—they need access to the data for productivity reasons.


6. Avoid creating excessive stubs.

Stub files are shortcuts in the mailbox pointing to the archived item that now resides in the archive and no longer on Exchange. Excessive use of stubs can create problems on Exchange with whitespace, fragmentation, and major I/O overhead.


7. Disable PST file creation.

This final step is important because, after all, what good would it do if you bring everything under control and then you do not prevent your users from creating PST files again? Use the policies that we referred to in step 2.

3. Retention

Deciding on your retention categories or how long you want to retain information within the archive will probably take up the most planning time. This process will involve most of the departments in your organization, from the storage team to the Exchange team, management, legal counsel, and even HR.

Retention controls the creation, filing, storage, and disposal of records in a way that is not only legally correct, but also administratively possible. Retention has to serve multiple purposes, fulfill the operational needs, and provide a way to preserve an adequate historical record of the information. It is very important to implement and practice proper retention management as it allows your organization to accomplish the following:

  • Reduce compliance and litigation risks by proactively managing the retention and disposition of all potentially discoverable information

  • Reduce storage costs by only storing important and relevant information in the archive

  • Have only the relevant information in the archive, which will also make it easier and faster to find relevant information

  • Increase the reliability of information by managing the appropriate versions of information assets and ensuring that they have high value as evidence if they are needed in a court of law

As we said earlier, you will most likely spend most of your time developing your retention policies, and there are significant benefits to first developing these policies before automating and implementing an archiving solution:


More Effective Regulatory Compliance

You don't have a choice when it comes to email retention for regulatory compliance; it is simply an absolute requirement. The only choice your company will have is in how you meet the requirements: manually or with an email archiving automation system. Creating and automating your email retention policy lowers your overall risk of non-compliance and ensures that all required email is kept for the required time period.


Better Legal Risk Management

The ability to show a court an updated and regularly enforced email retention policy can demonstrate retention policy intent and counter the claims of "spoliation" or purposeful destruction of evidence by the plaintiff's attorney.


More Consistent Corporate Governance

Organizations these days rely on the active generation, use, and leverage/reference of data for business processes and decisions. The data that a business generates has a value to the business if that data can be used efficiently. An effective retention policy will ensure that this information will remain available for some period of time, and an email archiving system allows for quick search and reference.

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