In addition to enhancing Exchange data protection, log shipping can also benefit email archival solutions. A challenge facing email archival solutions is the need to capture 100% of Exchange data for regulatory compliance - without impacting Exchange Server performance. Email archival solutions commonly use an Exchange feature called “Journaling” as a means of capturing 100% of incoming and outgoing email for regulatory compliance. Journaling is enabled for each Mailbox Store and keeps a physical copy of all incoming and outgoing email data in a separate journal mailbox. For a given Mailbox Store, Journaling effectively doubles the total message traffic. Therefore, as long as all other conditions such as CPU power, memory, and storage space remain constant, the enabled Mailbox Store can process approximately half of the message being sent. This results in approximately 15 to 35 percent performance degradation.

Log shipping offers a new approach to email archival without using Journaling. Because log shipping is a continuous backup method, it satisfies the need to capture 100% of Exchange data; thereby replacing Exchange Journaling. The data contained on the standby server is perfectly suited for email archival and it can be managed “off-host” with no impact on Exchange Server. This is a major improvement over traditional email archival solutions that rely on Journaling and severely impact Exchange Server performance.

Log shipping is a continuous backup process that benefits Exchange data protection and also benefits email archival solutions that, in the past, relied on Exchange Journaling to capture 100% of Exchange data for compliance. Log Shipping dramatically improves Exchange data protection and in the event of a server failure, limits the loss of data to very little or none at all. Log shipping can replace Exchange Journaling for capturing 100% email data for email archival without adding any performance burden on Exchange Server. Log shipping will be a part of the next major release of Exchange due in 2006 or 2007.