Exchange Archiving

So far we have spent some time talking about how Exchange has been engineered to take advantage of large commodity storage while keeping the data protected and the overall system highly available in order to deliver large, low cost mailboxes.

This time I wanted to spend some time talking about how to take those abilities out for a spin and get some concrete benefits.  Specifically, taking advantage of the extra storage to deploy an integrated archive at almost no additional cost and replace expensive add-on solutions.  

The term archive covers a lot of different scenarios that people have deployed for email.  The scenarios include: extending people's mailboxes to replace .pst’s and keep reference data around to reduce the amount of work recreating thoughts and ideas that have been worked through before; ensuring that the data that needs to be kept for compliance or policy reasons is actually retained; to make sure that discovery operations are reliable and cost-effective.  The great thing about an integrated approach is that, not only is the cost of any one of these scenarios lower than the alternatives but once you have deployed the archive for discovery and policy retention reasons, users get the direct benefit of an extended mailbox for free.

Ensuring that Exchange 2010 delivers across the complete set of scenarios that people think about when they design archiving solutions did mean working through a suite of features.  A lot of the discussion in this video is about how the different use cases are covered by the functionality in Exchange, but I also talk about the future of Exchange Archiving…there is always more work which can be done.

I'm interested in any questions or comments you have about Storage and Archiving.

Perry

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  If an archive mailbox is enabled how does this integrate with Outlook Cached using Cached Exchange Mode?  In other words, is it possible to include and/or exclude the archive mailbox in the offline file set (.OST)?

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  END users - can they see all their mail in 1 location or they will always have to look in live mailbox for something and then look in archive if they dont find in live mailbox? Hopefully they will be able to see all theit mail in 1 location (kinda like a shortcut) b/c they will never know how old a msg is that they are looking for. Thanks

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  @GeorgePR, Only the primary mailbox is available in the OST. I'll talk about the difference between a Large Mailbox and the Archive mailbox and how I think about using these in my next blog post later this week.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Hi Fabrice,  The ability to store the archive mailbox in a separate mailbox store will be available in Service Pack 1 (due for release later this year). You can find more details here: msexchangeteam.com/.../454533.aspx

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  @Barry, Great question. I'll talk about about offline access and archived email in my next blog post later this week.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  @Mickey, An interesting question which I've been asked a few times. I am working on another video with Ann which will answer this.  It should be ready to publish in a few weeks.

• Anonymous
  July 14, 2010
  i spend a lot of time reading about email archiving, this video blog was quite refreshing.  thanks for the change of pace Perry.

• Anonymous
  July 14, 2010
  Very good video thanks. I foresee a shift in companies archiving strategy and going back full circle to storing everything on Exchange 2010. Now that large mailboxes are quite possible on cheap disk with the ability to search on Exchange 2010 I agree that 3rd party archiving apps add an additional layer and cost.

• Anonymous
  July 14, 2010
  Hi, The new archive experience is a progress. But we must be able to have the archive mailbox in a separated/dedicated mailbox store. May be soon I hope.  

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2010
  Like the improvements for archiving announced in SP1. Remaining issue for me is dealing with people that leave as I can't assign to a another central account or search disconnected mailboxes that I holidng in delete mailbox retention

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2010
  I like the concept of Archive, I like the ability to import PST's with Sp1.  Applying policies to everything centrally is also great.  I agree with paul on the search of mailboxes that are no longer employees.  there can still be a legal requiment to keep those.   Other products can handle this and I'm sure the solution for these will include DPM or some third party tools.  maybe integration something for E15.

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2010
  Perry, very interesting information.  We are all for removing pst files from the network; however, the major challenge that we have is handling the use case where users are offline (i.e. not connected and require access to the archive -- perhaps sitting on an airport and needing to get to an email they had archived).  If we can solve this issue (i.e. allowing the archive to be mobile without connectivity) I might be able to convince my users to move away from pst's. Thoughts?

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2010
  Hey Perry. Good videos. Glad to hear that separating archive data in another mailbox store is coming in SP1. Have you guys considered stubbing or a form of stubbing for large attachments at least? My organization is considering adopting an archive system with stubbing to help improve our Exchange perf and reducing mailbox size for users automatically. Just curious if this may be coming too or what thoughts you have on it. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2010
  Thanks for good information.I find interesting exchange related topics.

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2011
  Many thanks for your invaluable videos Perry.  I'm interested LAGGED COPIES.  My gut feeling is that a Lagged Copy is a watse of a perfectly good DAG copy. And I see that the Whitepaper on MS's internal 2010 deployment states "Initially MS implemented a Lagged Copy ... re-evaluated ... changed Lagged Copy to be a 4th DAG copy".  I hope to go with a DAG spanning Datacebter1 and Datacenter2 with 2 copies in each site.  No backups.  No Lags.  But ... that does still feel a littel scary :-) Can you think of any specific (and realistic) scenarios where a Lagged Copy would add protection? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2012
  Please confirm what the supported limits are? What is the reccomended limits on items per folder in the archive please? What is the reccomended maximum size of the archive mailbox please? Thanks