Exchange……and the Vault

Anton LawrenceIT Services

6th March 2007

What is the Enterprise Vault?

• Product created by Veritas but now owned by Symantec

• Currently on version 7

What does it do?• Archives material based on a set of policies• Emails are moved from the Exchange store to a

different backend• But they are still accessible through the email

client/web interface.

What can it do?• Retain and delete emails based on policies• Policies can be controlled around Active

Directory Groups• Public Folder Archiving• Retrieve messages from pst files, scattered

around the university

Initially we will not be utilising any of these.

Why vault?• Exchange mailboxes are growing rapidy• Mailbox sizes of greater than 300Mb are now

not uncommon• Some are even larger!• Exchange has a limit of 2Gb per mailbox• There are over 40 users with more than 2Gb of

email in their Unix folders• ITS want to introduce quota-less email

How the vault helps• The vault moves messages away from your

mailbox and onto a filer• This can be done based on size or age…• …of message• Or the mailbox usage• These messages no longer take up your quota• And no longer take up space on our fast,

expensive mail server disk • They are indexed for easy searching.

How the system works

NetApp Fas960(Whiteknights)

NetApp Fas960(Early Gate)

Exchange Server

SNAPMIRR

OR

Ent Vault Server Ent. Vault SQL Server

NetApp R200

Archiving Job

Archiving Job• If the message meets archiving criteria, then a

“stub” is created. This is an ordinary message that contains To, From, Subject, date information and instructions about what the message. Also an extract from the original email.

Accessing Archived Emails

• Emails can be accessed through the email client (Outlook is preferred). Tools can be installed.

• Double clicking on a message will retrieve it• Clicking on the link will retrieve the message in

a web browser• Messages can be searched using tools within

Outlook or based on the web• Email can be accessed through OWA.

Manually Archiving Email• “I want to archive some of my messages!”

– You can do this through the use of Outlook and OWA tools

– Search– Archive Explorer– Place in Vault– Restore from Vault– Delete from Vault

Policies2 stage policy:1. Archive based on size: e.g. greater than 100Kb

after 2 weeks

Then

2. Archive based on date: e.g. archive everything after 6 months OR Archived based on mailbox usage: e.g. archive when 75% of mailbox used

Mail Server Space Savings

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

Before Vault After Vault

Gb Stored (Worst Case)GB Stored (Best Case)

Offline Access• It is possible to create a

cache of your vault store• This allows you to take

Vaulted email with you.• This is done through the

Offline Vault tool.

Demo