If you're happy with your organization's current electronic data management policy that involves storing terabytes or petabytes of data, causing your servers to perform at impressive snail-like speeds and waste time and power, more power to you-literally. For everyone else, MessageSolution asks you to consider how archiving your electronic data helps not only your company, but the whole world, by reducing your company's data footprints.

Like many green technologies, archiving is an eco-friendly technology that also saves plenty of the other kind of green. The goal of MessageSolution's storage management archiving software is more efficient use of existing corporate resources, which leads to a reduction in a company's data footprints. The effects of reducing your data footprints include increasing productivity, lowering power usage and cooling requirements, and utilizing fewer resources, both human and financial.

Sponsored by information technology analysts and consultants, GreenDataStorage.com lists "…archiving, on-line compression & single instance storage (de-duplication)" archiving as primary methods for data footprint reduction. These methods help businesses reduce their power consumption and IT resources without sacrificing functionality. In fact, every green technology mentioned below actually increases functionality and reduces the cost of information lifecycle management.

Archiving

Archiving is the act of collecting and storing data for future use. Archiving allows companies to retain as much data as they need by capturing and offloading data from email and file servers to a storage device. Archiving data off the email and file servers removes a large workload from the servers, allowing them to function more efficiently and use less energy to perform tasks. Archiving tends to place a very low burden on CPU resources. For example, Enterprise Email Archive utilizes only about 3-5% of CPU resources.

By centralizing historical data, archiving improves the efficiency of backup processes, as well as disaster recovery and e-discovery efforts. Locating and restoring data from an archive database is much faster than ad hoc efforts to locate data on multiple storage devices and even individual employees' computers. Archiving lowers the burden placed on primary systems and IT staff by optimizing data storage. Another great way to utilize storage resources more efficiently is by compressing data.

Data Compression

According to GreenDataStorage.com, data compression's ultimate goal is "to reduce the size of data to create a corresponding reduction in network bandwidth or storage capacity." Fortunately, many archiving products include compression as one of their storage reduction features. Enterprise Email Archive, for example, reduces data by anywhere from 50% to 80%. Data compression can be used for all tiers of storage. When combined with de-duplication technology, the data storage sizes can be reduced to a quarter of their original size.

Deduplication/Single Instance Storage

Single instance storage technology locates multiple instances of the same file and stores only one copy, thereby deduplicating archive reserves. Imagine how many times one email is sent to multiple employees or how many times the same attachment can be forwarded around. Without deduplication, every copy of an email or attachment sent to multiple employees or sent multiple times (or both!) would be stored to the archive, which wastes space in the archive and wastes time during e-discovery searches.

When reviewing archiving products, be sure to ask if the product supports single instance storage of attachments as well as emails. Why is this a critical point? Most businesses follow the "80/20 rule": 80% of storage space is used by large attachments, which comprise only 20% of total electronic communications. Most archiving products deduplicate emails, but fewer also deduplicate attachments. Neglecting attachments during the dedupe process significantly reduces total storage volume reduction.

Tiered Storage/Hierarchical Storage Management

According to GreenDataStorage.com, tiered storage or hierarchical storage management involves "aligning applicable storage and media to data and application requirements". In other words, tiered storage or hierarchical storage management is the process of placing less frequently used data on less performance-intensive storage devices, resulting in a 'tiered' or 'hierarchical' storage scheme. Hierarchical storage management reduces overall energy usage by storing data more efficiently. Another added benefit of tiered storage is cost reduction-but even if we could all afford to store everything on more expensive and power-intensive devices, that doesn't mean we should.

So if your IT department is ready to go green, consider a process like archiving that also improves internal efficiency and reduces operational costs, which makes CFO's (and the Earth) very happy.

About MessageSolution, Inc.
MessageSolution empowers today's organizations to better manage their messaging resources and corporate intelligence, whether their ultimate goal is to comply with industry or federal regulations, to respond more quickly to electronic discovery or litigation hold requests, to reduce storage requirements and costs, to optimize server functioning, or to prepare for disaster recovery. With more than 20 years of high tech experience, the MessageSolution team puts their skills to work creating software to solve IT problems for enterprises in various industries across the world. Find more information on MessageSolution.

About Enterprise Email Archive™
Enterprise Email Archive™ is MessageSolution's breakthrough on-site email archiving software solution designed for Exchange, Domino, GroupWise, and Linux messaging environments. Enterprise Email Archive™ contains advanced features to address the major business needs behind email archiving--storage management, regulatory compliance, electronic discovery, backup, and disaster recovery. For detailed product specifications and features, visit the Enterprise Email Archive product page.