WaterfordTechnologies.com Frequently Asked Questions 1
E-Mail How is an archive different than a backup? MailMeter email archiving captures a copy of every email that is sent or received through your email server in real-time and retains it in the archive. This ensures that every email is captured and can be recovered if the email is purposely or accidentally deleted. Emails that are deleted from the email server before a backup of the email server is done are lost and not in the backup. Backups are only snapshots of what was in the server at that time. So, if a user deletes an email during the day before the nightly backups, it could be potentially lost. Also, backups are commonly overwritten after a certain period, for example 2 weeks. How does Waterford Technologies MailMeter solution search and retrieve emails? When a search is performed, the data is searched against the index based on your search query. With the Investigate module, you can find emails, decide what s relevant and export any emails out to a standard PST file. Within the Individual Search module (ISR), the user can print or forward a copy back to themselves. This type of indexing allows for emails to be searched in a very quick and efficient manner. Waterford Technologies MailMeter software does message compression and single instance storage. How long does the implementation take for Waterford Technologies MailMeter solution? It takes only a few hours and not days. Our software requires minimal training and is simple to deploy, manage and operate. Is it possible to delete messages from Waterford Technologies MailMeter? Yes, it s possible to delete messages as an administrative function. End users do not have the ability to delete messages from the archive. Administrators have the ability to set up retention that can range from date based to message specific to meet any litigation hold requirements. Any searchable criteria (message, key word, mailbox, etc.) can be used to set up a retention period. What email platforms does Waterford Technologies MailMeter support? The software integrates with all the major email platforms including Microsoft Exchange 2003,2007,2010, 2013 (including hosted), Lotus Notes and Office365 2
Is it possible to upload an existing archive? Yes. Waterford Technologies offers professional services for data migration. Does a full audit trail exist? Yes. All messages are time and date stamped. The software also offers authenticity features which include a digital signature to ensure that the email or attachments have not been manipulated. Does Waterford Technologies MailMeter archive all emails? Yes. All emails that go through the email server are archived, internal and external. Does Waterford Technologies MailMeter solution impact the performance of the existing email server? No. Because the software is non-intrusive, it has no impact on the performance of your email server. Data Migration: can the product automatically migrate data between tiers or systems? If so, briefly describe. Yes The MailMeter products support data migration. Migration and ingestion of existing customer data is done by the software from files in either a pst or eml format. Using the optional Waterford Technologies pst crawler, searches for local pst files are done and they are actively imported and ingested into the software for archiving and searching. The Waterford Technologies suite of products are integral in the email platform migration process. Clients wishing to move from one email platform to another, ie. Lotus Notes to Exchange 2013, are usually concerned of their data being lost or compromised during the migration process. By including Waterford Technologies solution in their platform migration strategy, the client can go through this process with ease and comfort, knowing that all the email has been archived on the Waterford Technologies software. What are the differences between MailMeter and the built in archiving functions within Exchange and Office365? 3
To see a chart that outlines the numerous benefits of using MailMeter instead of Exchange or Office 365 built-in archiving, please click here. What is the advantage of a software email archiving solution over a hardware solution? A few of the advantages of using a software solution over hardware includes: More flexibility for deployment: You can install software on any physical or virtual server. It s really easy to back up virtual servers every night. You can install MM on one server, leverage an existing SQL server installation and point the archive volumes (where attachments reside) to any storage array. If you upgrade or change devices it s easy to copy data around Disaster recovery: If a server or hard-drive crashes you can quickly restore the data to a new device and your archive is quickly accessible. Many clients replicate data to the cloud in case of building issues or even run the entire archive from the cloud. Sure, you can buy next day delivery protection (for a fee!), but imagine telling the end users or lawyers who search the archive that it will be 1-2 days before they can get to their data. Space: with a software solution its easy to add disk capacity and you aren t constrained by hardware limitations. With hardware based solutions only the enterprise versions allow you to leverage external hardware if you run out of space. Or, you can always buy a bigger box not a good option How can you eliminate my PST files? With MailMeter, you simply point our software to the network location where the PST files are kept or to the individual PST files if they are disparate and import the data into the Archive. The archive will analyze the emails and attachments and only keep one copy in the archive, but accessible to any user that was on the email (sender, receiver, etc). For example, if 20 people kept the same email in each of their PST files, only one copy will be in the archive giving you great space savings. That 100 GB of PST files might be only 10 GB in the archive. Going forward if you want to disallow the use of PST files or tell users going forward there is all their data historical and real-time collected in the archive. MailMeter offers an individual search capacity ISR browser or Outlook add-in for end users to see any emails in the archive 4
that they sent or received. You can also import PST files for employees that are no longer with the organization and allow managers to see the emails if they need. Is MailMeter supported on virtual machines? Yes. This is a common method of deployment. How does your software collect the emails? MailMeter collects the emails in 3 ways Exchange: 1) Historical capture. Point to the Exchange server and import (copy the data) all the emails into the archive. This can be also done by time period (specific date range), user and folder. If you don t want to pull in all emails you don t have to. Many clients don t import conference room mailboxes for example or drafts that haven t been sent. From an implementation perspective, some IT directors give users an opportunity to clean up their mailboxes to ensure stuff they don t want their manager to see potentially is not in the archive. On the flip side, you might not want to allow users to delete evidence if you are concerned about legal challenges. Similar to PST import the messages and attachments are de-duplicated on import to keep only one copy in the archive. 2) PST import see above. 3) Journaling Create a new mailbox on Exchange and turn on journaling. This makes a copy of every email real-time and sends to the journal mailbox. MailMeter needs full administrative rights to pull emails from the mailbox. It s a multi-step process where the email is grabbed from the journal, written to the database, then deleted. The journal is just a conduit for collection and you will never see the mailbox get full. FILE How is an archive different than a backup? 5
Archiving updates the file reporting database every 5 minutes so you have an accurate depiction of your server. Archiving also makes it very easy to find and restore a file or even folder through a few clicks. Just search and restore. What types of archiving policies can be set? The policies vary from all files older than a certain date modified, accessed or created. You can add criteria such as files greater than a certain size, file types, owners and more. What is the most common archiving policy? The majority of clients implement a simple policy like age then mix in criteria such as folders. How does file archiving decrease my backup window? File archiving allows you to shrink your back-up window in 3 main ways 1) Reporting by having visibility into your files you can clean up older files that are no longer needed having less total data 2) You can apply an archive and delete policy for older data (ex: employees no longer with the company) that you can still retrieve if you need back. 3) By stubbing, the files are replaced with a 1k shortcut so instead of backing up large files you are just backing up small 1k files How do I backup the archive? There are 2 main data components of the product: 1) SQL Server This will be a small footprint because it s just basic attributes of the files. Any standard SQL backup utility will be fine. 2) Archive Volumes - the files are written to 4 GB volumes. Once they are closed they will never change so you don t have to back them up after the first full back-up. Every night you back up less than 4 GB, the last open volume. What is the ratio of files server to archive? The SQL server will build at a rate of 1GB per million files and the archive volumes should be about half the size of your server, but this all depends on the amount of duplicate files. How can you help me reduce the amount of time it takes to do a server migration? 6
We recommend stubbing files (1k shortcut), then moving the 1k files instead of the whole files. There will be the same number of files, but the size will be significantly less. Additionally, you can implement an archive and delete policy for older files to move less data. There is a recovery utility to restore files back (full or stubbed) to the main server or any alternative server. Can I just buy file server reporting without buying archiving? Yes, the software is managed via an electronic license key. You can start with reporting and layer archiving on later no new installation is required, just a license key. Does the file get re-stubbed if the file is accessed? It depends on your policy. If you have an accessed policy then no, but we recommend last modified so if the files are pulled back they would get rearchived if they are accessed. 7