email recovery

Activate your FREE membership today | Log-in CHANNEL NEWS IT CHANNEL NETWORKING SECURITY SYSTEMS RESOURCES SEARCH this site and the web SITE INDEX Home > Email file recovery opportunities Podcast: EMAIL THIS Email file recovery opportunities 20 Feb 2009 | SearchStorageChannel.com  Storage Channel Update  Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us     In this podcast, George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland, talks about email file recovery opportunities for solution providers. Read the transcript below or listen to the podcast. Play now:  Download for later:  Listen to the podcast with George Crump • Internet Explorer: Right Click > Save Target As • Firefox: Right Click > Save Link As What are some of the options that resellers and integrators should cover with customers for email file recovery? The first thing is to understand what exactly they're trying to recover. Is it going to be message data? Is it going to be the entire Exchange store? And what's the purpose for using that [recovered data]? And what are some of the key factors in recovering email? The big one is the timeframe. Typically, recovering the entire Exchange environment is going to be a very speed-pressured operation, so being able to get that information recovered, back online and ready to go in a very short period of time is going to be critical. Single-message recovery is typically probably as critical to a particular user, but to the organization as a whole doesn't have that same level of urgency that the whole system being down might have. So [in single-message recovery, speed isn't as critical as in a] full system recovery. What are the differences between e-mail file recovery and archive? Those terms are often used interchangeably. But, essentially, with email recovery, you're really focusing on the shorter end of that timeline: You need to get, most often, the most recent e-mail or the most recent e-mail message storage backup in place in a very quick order. Archive is really encompassing a vast array of subjects: long-term storage, typically some sort of an indexing method to be able to search and find and categorize different mail message. And in many cases now, [it encompasses] legal retention to adhere to either regulations or laws that the government has put on business. So, there's a higher legal component to the archive as well. Also, the archive process is, in many cases, nowadays, outside of the normal backup process. Resellers should really advise customers that keeping the backup of their email system for five years isn't exactly an email archive. That's where specific e-mail archive application systems come to play. Why does all the mindshare go to archiving rather than to recovery? I think it depends on whatever disaster happened to hit the user last. Almost every IT administrator that I speak to can tell you a horror story of spending the whole weekend trying recover the Exchange database because it got hit with a virus, or, more often than not, got corrupted. And the time to recover Exchange, in those situations, is never really factored in to the purchasing process. Very few people actually do a test of what a full system recovery might be. So, a real viable service that resellers should look at is actually going in and being that test for the customers. Say, "Look, let's pretend on our systems that your email server crashed; let's see how long it actually would take to bring the whole thing back up and be running." And then also maybe even, as a service, develop a run book by which they do that. I think that many customers will be very surprised at how long it will actually take them to recover an Exchange instance. It's much more complicated than just moving a seemingly small set of data from tape back to disk. And are there customers who are willing to pay for that kind of testing? Yes. We've seen many cases where they're willing to pay for that kind of testing. Now, they're not going to pay an egregious amount of money for it, but they will pay a fair rate. And then the resellers could [think in terms of just covering the cost of doing the test, to build up good will with the customer]. I would say at least in 90% of the cases we've been involved with, the email recovery goes nothing like the customer expected it to, and there's additional opportunities for the reseller to provide product to the end user. I think it's something that has suddenly become taken for granted, that everything now works, and it really shouldn't be [taken for granted]. The importance of email is amazing. If the email system's down, people actually stop working. It's almost like the phones got disconnected. It's a critical competent of the enterprise, probably moreso than ever. And bringing that subject up, talking to the customer about what their email file recovery and archive strategies look like. I think [that's a valuable subject] that resellers should spend some time going over with their customers.  Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us     STORAGE CHANNEL RELATED LINKS Ads by Google Tape Data Storage Download White Paper on NetApp VTL Integration for Your Network. www.NetApp.com/IN Data becoming a Monster? Tame your compliance, availability, retention and security monsters. www.tameyourdatamonster.com Change Management Grow Business faster with Business Objects. Act Now, Save up to 25%! www.businessobjects.com Cloud Storage Solution The Premier Cloud Storage Platform What are you waiting for? Start Now www.Nirvanix.com Free ZFS based NAS/iSCSI Trial Edition now available Unlimited snapshots & file systems www.nexenta.com RELATED CONTENT Data Archiving Storage channel briefs Deploying an email archiving system Creating an email retention policy How email archiving benefits your client Email archiving study guide Archiving vendors Webcast: Email archiving best practices Top five email archiving tools Data management tools heading toward integration Unified communications spurring storage services RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary About Us  |  Contact Us  |  For Advertisers  |  For Business Partners  |  Site Index  |  RSS SEARCH  TechTarget provides enterprise IT professionals with the information they need to perform their jobs - from developing strategy, to making cost-effective IT purchase decisions and managing their organizations' IT projects - with its network of technology-specific Web sites, events and magazines. 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