SMTP Archiving: How Much Can You Save?

Have you considered using SMTP Archiving with Enterprise Vault? 

These days, we all have incredible amounts of data to store, recall, protect, or otherwise maintain. Emails. So. Many. Emails. 

That’s fine, once you figure out how to keep all those emails safe, secure, and easily recoverable. But then you look at the price tag that comes along with email archiving. Between servers and software, and storage, the numbers can be daunting. 

Increasingly companies are deciding to preserve their email for legal and compliance reasons using an archiving product such as Veritas Enterprise Vault^TM, which has been the industry leading solution for 13 years.  

New deployments of Enterprise Vault are typically architected to use SMTP archiving, which is much more efficient than the traditional ‘Journal’ archiving.  According to the Enterprise Vault 12 – Performance Guide, using the ‘old’ way of journaling email from Exchange journal mailboxes, a 16 core server can archive 45,000 messages per hour. However, by using the new SMTP archiving process, the same server can archive 165,000 messages per hour – a 267% increase in performance! 

As an added benefit, the amount of storage space required for a full index of SMTP data is only 9%, compared to 13% for the indexing of Exchange Journal mailboxes (as we did in the “old days”).  That is about a 30% decrease in the amount of storage needed for the index. 

That is a great way to deploy a new EV environment with significantly fewer resources required for journaling, but what about mailbox archiving?  That still works the same way, and a rule of thumb is to use 1 Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archiving server for each 5,000 mailboxes to be archived. 

However, using our new Archive Accelerator Enterprise Search application, mailbox archiving is achieved with typically 1 server per 20,000 mailboxes.  In addition, the storage needed is reduced by using the SMTP archiving options, rather than required separate mailbox archives.   

Here is a graphic to show savings for a sample company: 

Don’t lose sight of one important factor here – cost savings could be greater or less based on the number of mailboxes, existing storage costs, and other expenses incurred with your current archiving set up.

We’d be happy to work with you to discover what your savings would be with this new architecture. Contact us today to see for yourself!