Storage software

Application-specific archival

Small businesses do not have a complex storage infrastructure and most of them are using DAS and tapes for archiving data. Predominantly they are using e-mail and database archiving solutions. By Abhinav Singh and Akhtar Pasha

Although there has been a move towards having better storage resources and moving towards an advanced storage infrastructure the level of the storage infrastructure in the small business is still small. Storage software to manage storage infrastructure is not on the minds of small businesses. But as per the survey, small businesses have moved towards having well-defined storage software for e-mail and database archiving. The auto & auto component, manufacturing, chemicals & pharmaceuticals verticals within the small business segment have taken the lead in adopting e-mail archival software. The survey has pointed out the IT spending patterns of small businesses. Additionally this survey also summarises as to where the industry is actually heading to in terms of technology trends.

E-mail archival tops the list

There is no doubt that there has been an explosive growth of e-mails, which has been witnessed even in the small business segment. For instance in the auto component space, companies that have emerged as tier-2 or 3 suppliers to the global automotive market are using e-mail archiving solutions because of the need to comply with regulations faced by their principals—automotive OEMs. The number of business records created and distributed via e-mail internally and externally continue to grow as the size of the messages and attachments increases for small businesses. This growth is driven in part by faster connection speeds. Many small businesses are now using broadband connectivity and partly by the fact that e-mail’s role as a primary channel for corporate communication continues to expand. Many small businesses are using e-mail for their business operations to communicate with their customers.

There is no doubt about the fact that e-mail is a unique application for small businesses as it is typically used by every employee of an organisation and for most individuals their e-mail client is the universal portal through which the majority of their daily work passes. Additionally, small business e-mail systems, most notably Microsoft Exchange, are integral parts of their business applications, such as pre-sales, sales force automation and customer-relationship management suites. According to analyst, Radicati Research corporate e-mail traffic will double by 2009, going from 64.9 to 120 billion messages a day. This finding underscores the fact that e-mail has emerged an essential way of conducting business and it needs to be protected and archived. Many small businesses are also pointing that their principals, large businesses, want them to archive e-mail as a part of regulations. E-mail has become the communications hub for small business; it is the means of transportation by which sales proposals, marketing plans, competitor profiles, contracts, and corporate intellectually property are now shared, distributed, stored, and accessed.

IT departments are constantly under pressure to lower costs and improve availability and reliability of e-mail systems like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. Large mailboxes and databases require additional time to backup and restore which also affect repair time in the event of database corruption. Now that the e-mail system has become the small business’s communications hub, it’s obvious that if e-mail goes down, the business goes down, and since timely access to information is money, it’s clear that the data stores must be protected and maintained at all costs. Ajoy Manjhi, assistant manager-IT, Keventer Agro Ltd says, “Our business is solely dependent on e-mail. We exchange e-mail messages with customers on agro produce and quotations. It is strategic as if we miss any e-mail from customers, it will result in loss of opportunity for us.” He continues, “We make sure to take incremental backups of all the e-mail (Outlook as e-mail client) by the close of the day so that no e-mail messages are lost. It also helps in tracking all the e-mail communications with our customers.”

Archiving e-mail to save space and costs

In the ongoing struggle to deal with excessive demands placed on IT to provide a more stable and predictable e-mail environment, some small businesses have set a per-user quota for e-mail. While a per-user quota system deals with basic storage management issues, it exposes a business to a number of risks and costs. End-users will often find ways to overcome mailbox limits by manually archiving their data, saving messages and attachments in desktop folders, or exporting information to PST files, which just transfers the storage and data management problem to one or more locations. As these large personal stores grow, application corruption and data loss is often experienced. The end result, confidential business data and intellectual property, up to 75 percent of which is now contained in e-mail, is scattered across the disparate computers with absolutely no record of their existence, as well as little or no protection of them. These issues make it extremely costly and difficult, if not impossible, to find e-mail messages when needed.

Governance, risk and compliance have emerged as additional business factors that are prompting small businesses to go in for e-mail archiving. One such regulation is SEBI’s Clause 91. Basel II and ISO 9001 are other such regulations. Many small businesses are suppliers to large OEMs domestically and globally, and slowly the regulations are setting in to archive all e-mail communications. Similarly, legal discovery requests against an organisation’s e-mail and IM files require timely extraction and delivery. According to market analysts about 40 percent of small businesses involved in electronic data discovery have had to produce e-mail messages as part of a legal or regulatory proceeding. If your business can’t retrieve specific e-mail records when regulators or prosecutors bang on your door, you run the risk of looking as if you are hiding information. The risk is even higher in those small businesses, which are doing B2B transactions/trading online.

While the business benefits of utilising an e-mail system as the communications hub have been far-reaching, the costs and risks for achieving these benefits have become a major challenge for small businesses and the IT departments they rely upon for immediate—as well as long-term—support and management of the e-mail system. Without some kind of retention, management, and protection strategy, the cost of storing and accessing all this information in a timely manner becomes prohibitive, mail stores become bloated or possibly corrupted, backups and restores take longer, and the business is impacted.

An e-mail active-archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time. It can be used independently or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses. E-mail active archiving is an important part of the solution to reduce the size of production e-mail data stores while gaining operational efficiencies such as reducing backup time, improving recovery, and eliminating the need for quotas while still keeping the active data store lean.

Simple steps to e-mail archiving

E-mail active archiving solutions achieve storage efficiency through Single Instance Storage (SIS). While SIS has been present in enterprise e-mail systems like Microsoft Exchange for some time, an Exchange system utilises more than one database. The foundation of SIS is that if a message with a 3 MB attachment is sent to 1,000 users within the same organisation, then only a single copy of that message and attachment will be saved within the database, and those 1,000 users will all have a pointer to access the item. The reality, however, is that if the users are spread out across multiple databases and servers within an organisation, each database or server will contain a copy of the message and attachment. Even PST files create a myriad of issues for the organisation, including the fact that they actually utilise much more space across the enterprise than if they had been left within the e-mail server. The PST file contains a complete copy of every message and attachment, and to compound this issue, the PST stores two copies of every message, one in Microsoft’s rich text format (RTF) and one in plain ASCII text. Imagine the impact on an organisation if there are hundreds of users we spoke of earlier exported a message with a 1 MB attachment. And you can see why SIS is so valuable.

Next: database archival

As per the survey many small businesses are also using software for database archiving. This means that some small businesses have also witnessed database growth for which they require database archival. Many small businesses are relying on mission critical applications especially in the case of chemical & pharma and the manufacturing segment. These applications rely on complex relational databases and these databases collect increasing amounts of data for business operations and decision-making. As a consequence, overloaded databases degrade performance and limit the availability of the comprehensive capabilities that these applications were designed to deliver. Ironically, most of this data is stored online in production databases but is rarely accessed. “Database archival allows for archiving and removing this rarely accessed data and storing it on a variety of storage mediums while providing easy access which is a critical requirement of most data retention legislation. Maintaining current, active data online and selecting the most appropriate storage medium for archived data ensures a cost-effective balance throughout the information lifecycle. This process also ensures that enterprise application databases are maintained at a manageable size to improve the performance and availability of critical systems,” says Supriya Basu, project leader, Score Information Technologies Ltd.

Basu continues we have observed that unmanaged database growth degrades performance and limits the availability of mission-critical applications and data warehouses. Accelerated database growth is expected to continue unabated. Yet despite their need to contain database sizes, many small businesses have been reluctant to remove data from production databases for fear of accidentally deleting essential data that could bring mission-critical systems to a halt. This is particularly true when data is stored in a relational database, where it is normalised across hundreds of tables, interconnected by hundreds of relationships. Another major concern is the need to quickly locate and access data as required for compliance once it is archived. Responding to audits, lawsuits and government or security investigations, as well as answering customer questions, requires fast and easy access to archived data. Strict data retention regulations increase costs, requiring that different types of industry data be saved for longer periods of time. Non-compliance has hefty penalties, driving the demand for cost-effective data management and storage solutions.

Many small businesses have been able to improve performance and availability. It has been realised that streamlining databases is critical to improving application performance, enhancing decision support and managing costs. Ongoing database archiving keeps databases operating at peak performance, providing a cost-effective, long-term solution to the problem of accelerating database growth, while maintaining optimal database size. In addition, routine maintenance, backup and re-organisation processing take less time because there is less data in the production database to process. Many small organisations are deploying enterprise data management technologies to provide high-speed data access, improve data backup and maintenance routines and reduce their TCO. Because database archiving optimises storage utilisation without hardware and software upgrades, it is a key component for enhancing the value proposition of other storage and data management technologies for small companies.

It has also been observed that archiving data from an operational database before it is moved to a data warehouse effectively preserves the original business context and referential integrity of the data. Most mainstream data warehouses are characterised by rapid data growth. Implementing new upgrades and software releases can be accomplished much faster, minimising any application downtime. Many small businesses are also archiving their business objective by database archiving as it directly addresses database growth issues and the impact on business operations. It has been observed that routine database archiving ensures optimal application and database performance. As response time and uptime improve, customer satisfaction increases, and your company can respond quickly and accurately to business or legal questions. In addition, by dramatically shortening batch and backup windows, database archiving improves the availability of mission-critical applications. Storing archived data on a variety of low-cost storage media, based on its business value and access requirements, can reduce the cost of data retention compliance throughout the information lifecycle. Additionally managing smaller databases offers more benefits as it provides a long-term solution for managing continued database growth and reducing the cost of compliance. Implementing a consistent database archiving methodology across the enterprise can help your organisation improve application performance and increase availability too.

Investments on e-mail archiving solution along with database archiving software will continue in the near future. Manufacturing, chemical and FMCG companies have shown the way on how e-mail and database archiving can be done effectively. As there network and storage complexity increase, they would switch to more comprehensive storage resource management solution.