Lotus Notes and Domino and Email Archiving

Although we know that the Lotus Notes and Domino make a very solid enterprise email system, keeping on top of the disk requirements for email in an organisation can often be an exercise in frustration and guess work.

In addition to the size of each individual user's mail the IT team also need to take into account

• Replicated copies of each database on clustered, high availability servers.
• Replicated copies on different servers whether for online, external browser access or for managing access from different locations.
• Local mail databases stored on laptops for disconnected access.

When you add in the extra 10%-20% required for the full-text indexes on each of the different mail files, on each of the different servers, the amount of disk required can quickly become a large problem.

As your email capacities increase so do many other important factors that can have an impact on your Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure. Finite resources like disk IO, network activity, CPU and especially backup times can all degrade proportionally to the continual increases in size of your user's mail files. This can affect not just your users access to their mail files, but many other systems and applications available on your network.

Lotus Notes and Domino's built in quota management and email archiving tools do go some way to helping reduce the load on your systems by pushing the email archiving features, processes and decisions onto the user's themselves. Forcing them to decide which emails are not important enough to be deleted and which attachments need to copied to which file shares before they can remove them from their mail files. They even have to remember to manually archive their mail files onto their local workstations, where they then become difficult to backup and increase the chance that information might be lost to a hard drive failure.

These functions help, but in forcing the users to undertake these tasks, the users are then dragged away from their main day to day jobs and forced to undertake manual housekeeping tasks that they are neither interested in or necessarily in a position to make the correct choices on. These are decisions that, in an ideal world, they should not need to make.

The recent inclusion of DAOS in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 promises huge disk savings on an individual server, but does little to alleviate either the backup times, network resources, CPU and full-text indexing processes all of which can have a bearing on your entire infrastructure.

Further issues within the Lotus Notes/Domino architecture arise when it comes to performing data recovery exercises that may arise from one of the many regulatory requests your organisation might encounter. These requests could include: information from data protection and freedom of information act requests or legal obligations from court cases or class actions.

Storing each user's email in their individual mail files mean it is incredibly hard and time consuming to locate all relevant information stored within the organisation, as each relevant mail file needs to be searched and logged. This quickly becomes a very time consuming activity that can easily take weeks to do thoroughly.

A good email archiving strategy using a system that creates email stubs or even completely removes the emails from the user's mail files can massively reduce the disk space requirements for each individual mail file and full-text indexes on each of the servers and workstations that it is stored. Thus, reducing your backup times and all other associated stresses on your entire infrastructure.

By centrally archiving all the emails the IT team can then truly take control of what is usually one of the biggest headaches for any organisation: the constantly increasing resources required to manage email.

Central storage of email also brings with it the advantages of having unified search across all business emails within the organisation, which can help not only in data recovery exercises, but also in general knowledge management for the users as they can quickly locate all relevant discussions and progress on events and campaigns that are occurring across the organisation.

Besides general full-text search Dexmar E2M's Shared Folders concept also mean that emails are correctly tagged and categorised according to the content, providing the ability to drill quickly down to the information whenever it is located.

• IBM - Notes/Domino Best Practices: Sizing - on www.ibm.com
• Sizing your IBM Lotus Domino Mail Servers - on www.ibm.com