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The Inevitable Growth of Email
It comes as no surprise to any email administrator that most Microsoft Exchange messaging systems are growing ? all organizations now rely on email in some form and this reliance continues to grow. The email administrator must also cater for the ever-increasing demands on Exchange resources as users are expecting high standards of service to support their dependence on email.
Research shows email system growth to be around 40%, this is the result of two simultaneous factors:
- Users are sending and receiving more emails
- The average size of emails is increasing
The increase in email size is particularly striking. Today's emails are seldom larger than 10MB or 20MB but the size is increasing rapidly. According to Ferris Research over the next 2 years mail systems will have to contend frequently with attachments in the range of 50MB to 200MB.
Organizations require a comprehensive strategy to tackle the increasing number of email messages and to gain control over the size of individual email messages, ensuring policy and performance are not compromised. This is known as a Mailbox Size Management Strategy.
Overloaded Exchange Stores
The value of email information has risen considerably as email has become the most widespread medium of business communication.
Email is critical business information, business protocols are changing dramatically, as are regulatory, technology, and records management requirements.
Exchange servers have to be fast and reliable - no matter how much your organization's email traffic increases and fluctuates. As Exchange systems store more and larger items, they become slower, affecting users' productivity, and increasing the Exchange Servers back-up and restore times significantly.
The right Mailbox Size Management solution should enable you to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets.
Too Much Reliance on PSTs
Personal Store files (PSTs) are part of Outlook and are used often to give each user unlimited storage on their personal storage areas, keeping the central Exchange Server free of excessive information. Relying on PSTs for corporate mailbox management may lead to ineffective management and storage of email.
Removing information from the Exchange system into PST files has proved to be only of short-term benefit and has then caused a number of problems for Administrators:
- Legally: They can no longer find information easily, as it becomes difficult to locate all the instances of the PST files and even more complex to then search for the information they contain.
Decentralized email obviously increases exposure to legal risk as it is not subject to normal content controls or archiving policy.
- Technically: PST files are simply not as reliable or reliably supported as the Exchange information store. For example, there is a well known 2GB limit to PST files before the release of Exchange 2003. If the PSTs are not included in the back-up policy, which happens frequently, the data runs the risk of total loss.
Most of the current debate on PSTs concerns their use in the longer term and the restoration of email information to the Exchange system or archive, so that organizations have legal and technical control over the valuable data contained.
It is vital for any organization which uses PSTs for capacity reasons to address their risks and commence a strategy to find, assess and archive their contents onto more appropriate storage media along with emails from Mailboxes.
The Cost of Increasing Email Size
Whilst users are keen to increase their use of email, the negative effects can be very evident to them. Sending and receiving larger emails can lead to:
- An increase in the time taken to send and receive messages, especially for remote users or users on poor bandwidth connections.
- A reduction in the performance of the Exchange Server(s).
- An unacceptable increase in system restore times (i.e. a failure to meet SLAs). - The use of PSTs to avoid system quotas, with resultant problems.
All of these complaints can result in an increased cost of maintaining the Exchange system and a drop in productivity for anyone using it.
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