Disclaimer

This product review reflects my own views on this product and as such reflect my opinion. While some GFI product documentation has been consulted for the sake of clarity, none of it has been reproduced wholesale for the sake of this review

 

Introduction

This document serves to document a review of GFI MailArchiver Version 5. The product was reviewed specifically for the purposes of

 

• Exchange Server Overhead
• Archive Retention Functionality
• Search
• Ease of Retrieval
• Storage Management
• Compliance Functionality
• Outlook Client integration
• User Experience

 

While these evaluation criteria may or may not be available in the product to a lesser or greater extent as a specific feature, the lack of a specific feature does not detract from the overall value of the product. These criteria may also differ significantly from your own, however have been chosen in order to measure the product.

Executive Summary

GFI MailArchiver is a scalable archiving product which may be used for several archiving scenarios as well as a legal and compliance scenario. It offers reporting and auditing on archive use and access, as well as easy access to the archive for users and administrators via web browser.

 

What is archiving

Archiving in is simplest form refers to the keeping of records in a safe place for later retrieval. Email archiving follows the same trend, however additional functionality may define the archive requirement for an organization. Some of these include:

 

• The never ending inbox - Users inboxes are archived and pruned regularly. Mail is moved into the archive for later retrieval, and the users mailbox shrinks accordingly. This creates the illusion of having unlimited storage capacity for the users, and holds advantages for the system administrator, as mail databases are kept to a finite size.
  
• Maintenance archiving - Mail and attachment items are stripped out of the mail database and stored in the mail archive. Users may or may not be given a replacement link to these items which have moved in their mail clients. Here the emphasis is on shrinking the mail database to a manageable size and managing email storage, versus keeping all possible mail. Reporting functionality should exist, providing the administrator with information on mail databases and archiving stores as well as information on the archive contents as well. These reports would have a strong storage focus and provide the administrator with information needed to plan and change storage as the mail organization evolves.
  
• Regulatory and legal - Ideally all mail that flows in or out of an organization must be kept in a mail archive which must ideally be proven to be tamper proof. Strong auditing functionality must exist for the use of the mail archive itself as well as providing for the ability to search and retrieve mail in a legal or compliance discovery scenario. The archive software will ideally provide reports as to what email has been accessed and by whom, as well as report on the overall administration activities surrounding the running of the archive. Archiving storage needs are potentially large as all mail needs to be kept for a number of years.

 

Which kind of mail archive is right for you? In finding an archive product, it is critical to identify your organizations archiving requirements first, and then matching them to a product. If your archive requirements are regulatory and legal, then search becomes a big deal, since there's no sense in having a great storage platform that can't retrieve your mail meaningfully during legal or regulatory discovery.

If your requirement centers around your users or storage, then the product should offer strong reporting features, to help plan and asses your mail archive periodically as well as report on the state of email databases.

You may find that you have both compliance and storage requirements for a mail archive and it would make sense to marry both of these into a single vendor as opposed to maintaining two separate and possibly legally conflicting methods of archiving.

Installation

MailArchiver supports several databases, including SQL 2000, SQL 2005 and Firebird. Firebird is an open source database, which does not suffer from the same performance limitations of the "free" versions of the two SQL products. If you are running an environment with more than one server or need to archive a lot, then this should not be a "click next" decision. Facing a potential database migration later in your archive's lifecycle is not a trivial decision. Installing and running the product in a lab environment and running through the database scenarios will clarify your understanding of choosing one over the other. If you're a small shop and can't afford the MS SQL license or don't want to use the limited free versions of MS SQL, this decision becomes even simpler.

 

If you're a MS SQL shop, then MailArchiver fully supports being installed on a SQL instance separate from the archiving machine. By default, MailArchiver installs a Firebird database, however, configuring your archive data to be stored in MS SQL database is well documented and easily achievable.

 

 

 

 

The installation document covers how to enable common journaling scenarios in Exchange 2003 and 2007, as well as covering how to enable Envelope Journaling if required.

 

Installing the product is rather straight forward and belies the potential scalability achievable by splitting the various roles performed by the product over several machines, namely : the Central Configuration Service, Data Collection, Storage, Search and Indexing, User Interface and Administration and  Data Import. While mentioned here, I wont be covering this topic much. More information may be found in the installation and product documentation.

 

On an important note, no agents are required or deployed during the installation or during the lifecycle of the product on any Exchange servers. Mail is retrieved using OLEDB or IMAP and helps the product retain a light network footprint, even in multi server environments.

 

Once installed the MailArchiver is administered entirely via a web console, making it easy to administer without needing to install software onto administrator workstations.