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Analysis: Information Lifecycle Management: Page 5 of 29

Most archiving software requires an Outlook or Notes client plug-in that displays a "message migrated" icon for users and automatically retrieves messages and attachments from the archive. Users with Macs and Linux machines may not have full functionality.

Ideally, ILM vendors will integrate their e-mail and file-management tools. Because many users create documents on file servers and then send the files to co-workers as attachments, the same file exists in both the file system and mail server data store. Using a collision-resistant hashing algorithm, like SHA-2, an integrated file/e-mail ILM system could identify these redundancies and keep only a single copy, saving disk space.

We expect vendors like EMC that have both file and e-mail management products to come to the plate soon with integrated suites. Right now, Scentric's Destiny provides some policy-based data extraction for Exchange and file data, but it lacks message logging and the ability to redirect messages to the archive, both capabilities found in full featured e-mail archiving applications.

Database Dilemma

With a database migration engine and a little work, your storage admins and DBAs can get production, test, development and spare databases allocated to appropriate storage tiers. However, when it comes to migrating data as it ages and changes value, files and e-mail messages have the advantage in that they always have a time stamp in the same place.