Exchange

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Exchange
and the Vault
Anton LawrenceIT Services6th March 2007
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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.

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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.
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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

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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.

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How the system works
Exchange Server
SNAPMIRROR
NetApp Fas960 (Early Gate)
NetApp Fas960 (Whiteknights)
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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.

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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.

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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

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Policies

• 2 stage policy
• Archive based on size e.g. greater than 100Kb
  after 2 weeks
• Then
• 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

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Mail Server Space Savings
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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.

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Demo