Trend Micro Lightens Exchange’s Load

Trend Micro is branching out from its anti-malware roots to offer an e-mail archiving solution for mid-sized businesses running Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers.

Trend Micro Message Archiver (TMMA) stores and compresses e-mail on its own server, allowing for the storage load to be reduced on the mail server while retaining a fast, searchable archive of the e-mail.

With all kinds of new regulations, companies are under more pressure to maintain an accurate, easily searchable archive of e-mails. Just last month, financial services giant Morgan Stanley had to pay a $15 million for failure to produce e-mails in a timely fashion.

“The issue we have seen coming from a lot of businesses is they are having problem managing the storage in Exchange environments and e-mail in general,” Todd Thiemann, director of incubation marketing at Trend, told InternetNews.com. “The other pain point comes from search retrievals. It could be due to government regulations or litigation and you need to respond to a request for evidence or you could get hit with fines.”

The only impact of TMMA is that journaling must be activated on the Exchange server, which has a minor impact on performance. Because e-mail is no longer stored on the Exchange server, offloading the archiving and searching part counterbalances that, Thiemann said.

One feature that Thiemann felt was truly unique was what Trend calls Data Guardian, which triggers an alert to an assigned “guardian” every time a search is done. So if someone in HR does a search, legal might be notified.

In talking to prospective customers, this feature was well-received. “They said Data Guardian is a real important functionality, because [they] want to make sure this system doesn’t get abused,” Thiemann said.

All internal and external e-mail is archived, spam included, so a spam filter is highly recommended. E-mails deleted from the Exchange server are replaced with a shortcut that points to where they are stored in the archive. File attachments are also saved as stubs on the server.

All the e-mails are compressed down, reducing space requirements by as much as 80 percent. The indexer is smart enough to recognize if an e-mail is sent to multiple people, so only a single copy is saved, according to Thiemann.

The current version only supports Exchange 2003, but later this year will come versions for Exchange 2007 and Lotus Notes.

Trend Micro Message Archiver is available immediately with pricing based on a per-user basis.

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