George needs an archive!

I thought that the following article from the AP last week was an interesting insight to the fact that even our government still does not understand the importance of Archiving:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WHITE_HOUSE_E_MAIL?SITE=AZMES&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

The White House is missing 225 days of email. They are accepting bids for a recovery process that will include 35,000 disaster recovery tapes. 35,000!!! As a former Exchange administrator and as some of you are as well we can all understand the time it takes to restore 10 tapes let alone 35,000. I am sure that the bids for this project will be quite large as the labor involved will be high.

This should be a lesson to all those out there still using backup tapes for recovery or for your archiving solution. If an archiving solution was in place at the White House there would be no need to restore backup tapes in an effort to find emails that are being requested. The information could be easily searched for from the archive and exported in a readable format or even recovered as individual messages.

I think that the tape backup era is coming to a close. With so many different solutions on the market that now offer better performance than tape I can’t imagine anyone sticking with tape as a medium to store data for disaster recovery. Take Microsoft’s DPM for example. Although they have the option to store data on tape they also have the option to store online snapshots of the Exchange email system for quick disk-based recovery in the event of a disaster. There are also a number of other storage vendors on the market using a snapshot technology to backup Exchange and other email systems. As the cost of storage decreases the popularity of these disk-based backup systems is increasing.

Using a disk-based backup system in combination with an Archive would mean that organizations no longer need to rely on tape backup for their email systems. The disk-based backup can be used for near term recovery (under 1 year) and the archive for longer term recovery. Information over 1 year old is typically only requested for discovery purposes. Most users would not make requests for restore of their email if they have not accessed it in a year.

It will be interesting (and painful) to see how much this process might cost our government. As you and I both know it is not the government that will be paying. It will be us with our tax dollars.

George – Please buy an archiving system!

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Email Archiving, eDiscovery, White House Missing Email, Tape Backup, Microsoft DPM, Snapshots, Disk-based Backup