Nov 26 -- Sunbelt Software USA, a provider of Windows security and management software, has announced the release of Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA), its new email archiving solution for Microsoft Exchange environments.
SEA delivers cost-effective enterprise-class email archiving for organizations of all sizes, providing administrators with intelligent features such as integrated Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), Direct Archiving for instant archival of incoming mail, full email continuity and disaster recovery, and seamless integration with Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA), Sunbelt said.
SEA combines efficiency and innovation to give organizations a powerful email lifecycle management system that offers tamper-proof, long-term storage of emails with easy retrieval capabilities and full-text searching, Sunbelt said. SEA enables companies to preserve all electronic messages on a broad range of storage media, offloading the strain on Exchange servers, it said.
Headquartered in Tampa Bay (Clearwater), Florida, Sunbelt was founded in 1994 and is a provider of Windows security and management software with product solutions in the areas of antispam and antivirus, antispyware, and vulnerability assessment, Sunbelt said. Its products include the CounterSpy product line, Ninja Email Security and endpoint firewall technologies, it said. The company is part of Sunbelt International Group, based in Paris, France, the company added.
Among all of the problems faced by users, Osterman Research Inc. has found that in managing email systems over the past two years, growth in email storage has been the most serious problem, with about 60 percent of messaging decision makers as serious or very serious, Osterman Research of Black Diamond, Washington said. The ability to archive content quickly and efficiently can ease the burden of managing an email system, not to mention the benefits it provides for disaster recovery, preserving corporate knowledge and other capabilities, it added.
SEA provides a cost-effective solution for customers concerned with archiving email for legal, retention and compliance reasons, as well as significant benefits in terms of reducing the size of the Exchange store, Sunbelt said. With SEA, customers are able to better cope with the growing volume of emails and gain control over their email management storage costs, while ensuring compliance and increasing performance and efficiency, the company said.
The Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) engine is at the core of SEA and was developed specifically for high volume archiving processes, Sunbelt said. The HSM engine redirects emails to and from the Exchange server, database and various storage media, the company said.
Unlike other archiving solutions, SEA's built-in HSM functionality is available at no additional cost, and delivers a number of unique features that help simplify the archiving and disaster recovery process for administrators, including flexible storage optimization, parallel and long-term archiving, and a third party product integration post processing tool, the company said.
The HSM store is also ideal for disaster recovery purposes, as it locates and retrieves emails from multiple storage devices and delivers them to multiple mailboxes in the quickest response time, Sunbelt said.
SEA provides a unique direct archiving feature that enables archiving of emails immediately after they are received, Sunbelt said. Direct Archiving is a significant breakthrough in efficient email archiving, which eliminates the need for the Exchange Journal mailbox. Immediate archiving onto storage media improves the performance of the Exchange server, helps to ensure legal compliance, and diminishes the necessity to apply scheduler, threshold and quota archiving jobs, the company said.
SEA allows full business continuity should the Exchange server goes down by providing access to archived mails, Sunbelt said. In the event of a power outage, natural disaster or human error, and the Exchange server crashes, SEA archives all incoming and outgoing emails to protect against email loss, it said. The administrator retrieves multiple saved messages on duplicate storage quickly, and once the Exchange server is repaired or replaced, email and more importantly, business continuity is guaranteed, the company added.
SEA is fully transparent with Outlook and OWA, so users experience no difference between archived messages and non-archived messages, Sunbelt said. No special software needs to be installed on the client for archiving to take place, only a small icon in Outlook indicates that an email message has been archived. Messages can be searched, edited, forwarded, moved to other folders or deleted. Unlike traditional storage methods, it is interactive, enabling users to access and retrieve archived messages at any time, immediately and transparently, the company said.
SEA also has the ability to automatically or manually import PST files throughout an organization, ensuring that emails archived in the past by users are brought into SEA for complete management, Sunbelt said. This tool enables administrators to import existing PST files, including folder structure, to the email archive no matter which device PST files are stored on, it said.
SEA provides a Blackberry compatibility feature that allows users to view archived messages on their PDA (personal digital assistant), it said.
For those organizations that use both Microsoft and Apple systems on a daily basis, Mac users can also access archived emails through the Entourage office suite for Mac OS X, Sunbelt said.
Easy-to-use search capabilities in SEA's eDiscovery web interface allow users to search for archived messages and attachments, Sunbelt said. This can be accessed directly from an Outlook add-in or through an Internet browser. Both simple and complex search queries can be made using the extensive search criteria both in body text and attachments, the company said. The searches are granular and permission-based for users, administrators, and auditors. Additionally, results can be viewed in detailed reports and exported as PST files for portability, it added.
SEA is currently available and priced aggressively for all corporate environments and includes one year of support, updates and upgrades, Sunbelt said. Customers can purchase SEA on a per-mailbox basis, it said.
Pricing includes the first year maintenance and starts at US$ 249.00 for 5 mailboxes with a sliding scale discount based on number of mailboxes, Sunbelt said. A 30-day trial version of SEA is available on the company website. SEA supports Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003, and 2007 server systems, it said.
