The PostPath Server Archive Edition

Keeping a complete archive of email has become increasingly important with the introduction of regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), and increasingly more difficult to achieve. Using Microsoft Exchange for this incurs the cost of additional server and operating system licenses. There are third-party hardware solutions, but these are both complex and costly.

The PostPath Server Archive Edtion aims to change that, by providing an affordable, easy to configure solution. The PostPath Server Archive Edition uses "simple-forward archiving", working with the PostPath Email and Collaboration Server to create an archived copy of every email message that goes through your business, without constant maintenance by your IT staff.

Microsoft Exchange vs. PostPath Archive Edition

Creating an archive in Exchange is a complex, multi-stage process. Because of the way Exchange is constructed, any archive system used with it requires that Exchange's Journaling system be turned on. The process of archiving a message then takes several steps:

  1. The incoming message is moved by the Message Transport Agent (MTA) through the Exchange core into Exchange's JET database
  2. The Journaling function passes the message back through the Exchange core to the MTA
  3. The MTA sends the message to the Journal Server's MTA
  4. The Journal Server's MTA passes the message through its Exchange core to the Journal Server's JET database
  5. The archiving agent extracts the message from the JET database, and moves it to the archiving agent's storage
  6. The archiving agent deletes the message from the Journal Server's JET database
This process requires four traversals within two Exchange servers, three servers total, and writes to three separate stores. The job gets done, but it is both highly inefficient and costly in hardware and software.

Using PostPath Server Email and Collaboration Server in conjunction with the PostPath Server Archive Edition is an entirely different story:

  1. The incoming message is forked by the Message Transport Agent (MTA), one copy passes through the PostPath Server to be stored on the filesystem, the other copy gets passed directly to the PostPath Archive Server
  2. The PostPath Archive Server's MTA passes the message through the Archive Server to be stored on the filesystem
With PostPath Server Archive Edition, the incoming message is sent directly to the archiving server, without the performance impact of multiple passes through the core email server. This approach is much more efficient from a processing standpoint, requiring less processing power to handle an incoming message. Coupled with PostPath's highly-efficient use of the filesystem for message storage, without using the corruption-prone, processor-intensive JET database, the PostPath Server Archive Edition offers higher-performance at lower cost than Exchange-based archiving solutions.

Conventional Backups vs. PostPath Server Archive Edition

Because third-party Exchange archiving is so expensive and complex to implement, many small and medium-size businesses forego implementing an archive solution in hopes that they will never need to find archived emails. If they do need to retrieve old emails, they resort to retrieving them from the backup tapes. However, backup tapes are not archives, and have some very serious problems when used in place of an archive system.

Normal backups have two problems from an archive viewpoint:

  1. They can miss email messages that are received and deleted between backups
  2. Searching backup media (tapes, CDs, or DVDs) is a lengthy, time consuming process
PostPath Server Archive Edition creates a copy of each message as it is received, and stores them on a live server. In the event a message needs to be restored, the administrator simply searches the archive server without having to go through the individual backup media.

The PostPath Server Archive Edition

The PostPath Server Archive Edition is the perfect archive solution for small and medium-sized businesses looking for an easy, affordable way to implement an archive solution. Without having to resort to expensive Exchange and Windows Server licenses, and the expensive hardware that follows, businesses can now comply with eDiscovery requirements without breaking the bank.

Download the PostPath Server Archive Edition Whitepaper
Download the Archiving, Antivirus, & Compliance Whitepaper
Download the PostPath Server Archive Edition FAQ