It is awesome that Microsoft has put archiving into exchange. However it is interesting how much buzz, and how many questions there are around it. In the past several months I have been fielding questions about archiving and many of them are coming from customers that have had an archiving vendor in to discuss the topic with them.

Because of this I really wanted to do some research about Archiving and the reasons to archive and then try to figure out what all the buzz is about. I will openly say I am a fan of Microsoft solutions simply because in many cases I find I can do more with less. And administratively my headaches are less when I do not have to introduce in as many 3rd party solutions. Microsoft does not always meet the need 100% but many times they meet 80% of what is needed. And in email archiving I think they have met that requirement. Here is why.

Generally when i talk with customers about archiving they have several reasons for doing it.

• Legal reasons
• Exchange performance
• Exchange database size
  • Large databases are difficult to backup and recover
  • usually the Client (outlook) does not perform well with large mailboxes
• Compliance reasons (this may fit the legal reasons but some separate it out)
• companies want to use tiered storage so archiving should decrease storage costs.

Legal Reasons (where Exchange is at)

First I want to make it clear I am not a lawyer. So I could be wrong on any of this. However one of the points being used against exchange  2010 archiving is BATES Numbering. Now I am not completely sure what this is. but my understanding is that is a numbering scheme for legal discovery.

Some archive products have this and if you are in court a lot with discovery cases then this may be a pretty solid requirement. However not all archive products have it either. so if you only reason for archiving is legal purposes be sure you do plenty of research on this and make sure you legal team has input. from what I can find so far Exchange does not use or implement Bates Numbering with in it’s archive solution. But I am betting at some point a vendor will come along that will do just that.

Compliance Reasons

I would argue that Microsoft has a decent solution here for medium business. Often times they are looking for something that they can just search the database when someone complains of an HR issue. or they are looking for something that will help them restrict communications between different resources. I believe Microsoft is closer in this arena then most people think. However I still have more digging to do. and will start to write some more technical blogs around this later

Exchange Performance and Database Size

This is where i want to dig in a little more. simply because I think many organizations have this problem and are concerned about it. and are looking at archive solutions just for this. I would suggest that organizations be very careful when reviewing archive solutions for this purpose.

What I have found is that many of them will take up more space then the exchange Databases and the disk requirements are often times greater then exchange. This does not make any sense to me since it is an archive solution. With some of the new features of Exchange 2010 you can archive with in Exchange.

Yes to do Exchange Archive you enable a archiving for a user and it makes a new mailbox with in the same database. Yes that seems a little strange and immediately people start to say well that does not do anything for me. And yes if you follow the old Exchange 2003 methodology you are correct it does nothing for you.

However if you start to really read and review what they have done with Exchange 2010 as a whole it starts to make sense. Yes I am seeing vendors of archive products fail to tell people the whole story about Exchange 2010.

In order to understand why they are creating archive this way you need to understand that Exchange has 70% less I\O requirements then exchange 2003. this and some other neat features enables Exchange Databases to run on SATA Disks (yes that is the bottom of  tiered storage) So now with less I\O requirements my databases can grow much larger and still maintain some outstanding performance.

But this brings up another question. Most Exchange Admins I know do not like to have their databases grow over 100 GB even in Exchange 2007. This was not really because of performance but because of Backup and Recovery. So now i am telling you let the database grow. Now Microsoft is saying realistically you can let them grow to 2 TB. WOW that is huge but now think of the backup and recovery ramifications.

That is why Microsoft is looking at Backup-less Exchange as a possibility now. With the new DAG you can actually set databases to be LAGGED. this means that you could set a database copy to be 24 hours to 2 weeks behind the actual active copy. And you can have up to 16 databases. As well as your backup software could actually backup off the passive node or even one of the lagged DB’s. This means my backup windows never close. So it would be possible to do a weekly backup and keep 6 days on disk. and each day litterly be able to start up fairly quickly on its own with out you having to restore it. Amazing.

So all this together now starts to make Microsoft’s methodology of Archiving make more sense. Ask your archive vendors how do they handle HA between DR sites. How about backing it all up. As their Data Store grows it also becomes difficult to backup and recover.

I know there is a ton more and I have only scratched the surface on this. but I have written a very long blog post that many will not read. so I am going to stop now.

have a great day and hope this helps someone.