Disaster Preparedness for Messaging
Del.icio.usAsk any knowledge worker what application he or she starts and ends the day with and you have a very high probability of hearing email, or one of its many synonyms. Today’s IT professionals face a huge challenge in this space that will not get any easier in the future, and that challenge is ongoing availability.
In experience working alongside Novell’s tremendous support professionals I constantly hear stories about customer concerns about how their messaging system operates from a speed and effectiveness perspective. Only in very rare cases are these product related and most of the time the concerns are related to mailbox bloat. It shouldn’t surprise any of us that users don’t use the delete key in the mailbox.
There are lots of reasons for this, fear of loss, ease of finding old messages, internal rules, legislation, compliance, all rear their heads. Most messaging systems have a “local archive” capability but really this is not an optimal solution. That’s why we at Novell are benefitted by having partners that build complete archival systems that work with GroupWise that are already aligned with legal and commercial requirements, that provide high ease of use clients and fast, reliable searching. Whether this is implemented through stubs into the GroupWise client or delivered through a browser is a lot less relevant than having an archive solution in the first place. Customers have choice and can pick the solution that best fits their needs.
This is great, but it’s not enough.
The real challenge is that no enterprise can be without email. It is possible, and good practice to leverage clustering technologies, SANs and other components to make the messaging system as fault tolerant as possible, but all too often it doesn’t go far enough.
Up until the advent of archiving solutions, doing a disaster preparedness plan for messaging was really tough because of how messages are stored in different systems and the sheer volume involved. With PlateSpin Protect, it gets a lot simpler.
Note that I said Disaster Preparedness. I encourage readers to use this wording rather than Disaster Recovery. Prior to joining Novell one of the services my company offered was enterprise recovery services. Despite great customer commitment, most recovery tests in those days failed badly and the time to restore could put companies in serious danger of financial failure because of the time deltas. Being Prepared is always preferable to having to do Recovery.
GroupWise uses a multiple folder storage model that is well adapted to a PlateSpin Protect model. By leveraging our partner archival tools, our customers can keep their GroupWise systems light and fast, and by leveraging PlateSpin protect in addition to our own cluster capability, they can be assured that the most demanded application is available even in the case where the primary storage or facility itself is compromised. As we look forward, data storage consumption will only increase, so backup restoration becomes less and less useful and palatable in the real world.
GroupWise + Partner Archival Tool + PlateSpin Protect = Disaster Prepared Messaging
A conversation worth having with our customers and partners I think.
Until next time, peace.
Ross