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IT RESELLER - September 2002
QStar Solution for Email Archive
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With the prospect of regulatory requirements enforcing businesses all over Europe to implement e-mail archiving, and with e-mail being one of the largest growth sectors in data storage, problems lie ahead for those organisations that do not plan effectively for the future.
Even without a mandate from Brussels and where legal admissibility is not an issue, it is a wise company that is able to demonstrate that the electronic communications with which they operate their business are both authentic and securely stored beyond reproach.
BSI has published DISC PD 0008/9, a code of practice for Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically and an associated compliance workbook. When applied to e-mails, such aspects as immediate availability, guaranteed integrity and data security need to be to the fore.
There are a growing number of software products that provide the day-to-day management of e-mail systems. Providing individual mailbox quotas, fast search engines and archival areas are but just a few of their features. To securely store the archival data for the regulatory periods of time requires a robust and high performing sub-system, such a sub-system is QStar’s Storage Management software controlling an optical disk jukebox.
QStar’s solution will remove many of the headaches associated with the long-term storage of static data. By providing secure on-line archival storage transparently to the e-mail management application, journals may be secured instantly providing demonstrable audit trails, users mail may be archived but still retain immediate availability and storage can expand exponentially without burdening the back-up regime. QStar provide a secure storage solution that is independent of the applications and can provide secure archival file systems for many differing requirements such as billing and logging systems, on-line transaction processing, document image management and CAD/CAM libraries.
QStar software provides multiple transparent archival file systems for differing aspects of the application to use. Each file system can dynamically expand as the storage needs grow. The file systems duplicate themselves automatically as they expand, producing duplicate media for remote off-site storage on a continual basis. Alternatively, QStar can provide real-time mirroring across different locations to provide instantaneous availability of data in the event of a catastrophic failure of one site. With optical technologies providing upwards of 30-40 years guaranteed data life, the on-line archives and remote copies will need no ongoing overhead to maintain them.
To improve access times to on-line archives, QStar software configures high performance and transparent front-end caches for each file system created. This allows rapid access to frequent and recent data within the archive. Data not held in the cache is available in seconds from the optical disk jukebox. QStar software also allows for the off lining of data from the jukebox whilst still retaining it as part of a mounted file system.
With e-mail systems scaling to many Terabytes, the benefits of manageability of the e-mails by both users and administrators, the secure long-term archival storage with instant accessibility and the removal of the burden on the nightly back-ups is a hard one to argue against.
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