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