GFI Releases Corporate E-mail Archiving Product for Exchange Server
GFI MailArchiver enables companies to fulfill legal mail archiving requirements in a simple, effective way
London, UK, 1 December 2004 -- GFI today announced the release of GFI MailArchiver for Exchange, a new, easy-to-use e-mail archiving solution that enables organizations to archive all internal and external mail into a single SQL database. Now companies can easily fulfill regulatory requirements (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) while also providing users with easy, centralized access to past e-mail via a web-based search interface.
Legislation requiring organizations to archive corporate documentation (including e-mail) is on the increase, including the seminal Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations such as the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) Rule, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and many more. The price of non-compliance is high: In March of this year, for example, Bank of America was fined $10 million for failing to keep all its e-mail records relating to a recent merger, as required by the SEC. Storing the required information without having easy access to the specific e-mails requested is not much use either. In the case Murphy Oil USA, Inc vs. Fluor Daniel, Inc (2002), the defendant was ordered to print the e-mails stored on 93 backup tapes and to cover the estimated cost of $2.6 million to do so.
Leveraging Exchange Server's Journaling Feature
GFI MailArchiver for Exchange enables organizations to comply with these regulations in a simple and effective manner. It leverages the journaling feature of Exchange Server, providing unparalleled scalability and reliability. Exchange Server 2000/2003 journals all mail to a particular mailbox, after which GFI MailArchiver retrieves them, compresses any attachments, and archives them to Microsoft SQL Server. This, in turn, provides end-users with a single location in which to search all their past e-mails and ends the need for users to manage e-mails in proprietary PST files that are difficult to back up and search.
"Other mail archiving solutions replace one's corporate mail with a link to their database. This can be a point of failure and can bring down your entire e-mail system. By comparison, GFI MailArchiver works in parallel with Exchange Server and does not touch the way Exchange works," explained Nick Galea, GFI CEO. "This way, GFI MailArchiver presents a smoother, less intrusive method for storing e-mail."
Storing all the corporate mail on Exchange Server would result in a decline in e-mail performance over time. Moving old e-mails into a SQL Server database keeps the organization's Exchange stores compact and its Exchange performance high. Backing up SQL databases is also much easier than backing up Exchange Server stores.
Reduction in E-mail Storage Requirements
GFI MailArchiver compresses and decompresses attachments on the fly, which results in considerable storage savings when compared to storing attachments in the Exchange stores. In addition, there are more compression and backup features and tools available for SQL Server than for Exchange. An added advantage is that GFI MailArchiver archives only one copy of attachments sent to multiple recipients. Besides, archiving e-mail in SQL Server is 50 percent more space-efficient than doing so in PST files.
Puts an End to PST Hell
Assisting users to archive and manage old mail in local PST files is time-intensive and cumbersome for administrators. These PST files usually end up being very large and are difficult to organize, back up, and search. GFI MailArchiver for Exchange eliminates the need for this. With GFI MailArchiver, users can browse to the Web search interface and retrieve past e-mail from the SQL database, rather than having to dig through a store of PST files on disk to find a particular mail.
Pricing and Availability
GFI MailArchiver is available from distributors around the world or online at the GFI website (http://www.gfi.com). It is highly cost-effective with prices starting at US $350 for up to 50 mailboxes; a version for unlimited mailboxes costs $1250. For more information and to download the product, one can visit http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/.
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