Thanks to increasing compliance and performance demands, e-mail archiving is also beginning to occupy Exchange administrators’ time. E-mail archiving solutions promise to reduce database size and improve performance, however, in reality they exacerbate the issue. These solutions basically yank core data out of the database, leaving a stub behind that can be used to view or extract the data from the archive if needed. Customers’ expectations are that since 80% of the data was archived, then the Exchange database will automatically become smaller and more efficient. The problem, however, is that archive solutions do nothing to reclaim the space that data vacates, nor does it check and correct errors, indexes, or other issues that must be addressed to ensure the health and optimization of the Exchange system.
This means that if you have a 100GB database and archive 80% of it, the expected result is to have a 20GB database; however, in reality the database is still 100GB and will continue to grow and degrade until it’s properly maintained. This means processing a 100GB database every time a backup takes place, and if a restore is required you must restore the 100GB database, even though it only contains 20GB of data. The database also contains errors and other inefficiencies that will impact and degrade system performance.
To gain that disk space back in a usable form, administrators are surprised to learn that after implementing an archiving solution they must manually run cumbersome Microsoft utility programs after-hours. Lucid8’s GOexchange is the alternative that takes maintenance to the next level — automatically — increasing the benefits of space reclamation, while also rebuilding indexes, removing hidden errors and inconsistencies to increase the health and optimization of the Exchange system.
Bottom Line
Archiving is an important element of proper Exchange information management, but Lucid8’s technology provides Archiving vendors and their customers the ability to achieve the promised and desired goal of smaller, more efficient and optimized databases — automatically. In conjunction with a good archive solution, Lucid8’s GOexchange creates comprehensive and efficient e-mail usage, archiving, maintenance, data protection and recovery capabilities.