Extraction performance does matter!
- By:
- Admin |
- November 13, 2015 |
- minute read
Companies that purchased legacy email archives are now looking for ways to move away from these problematic and expensive white elephants to newer and less expensive email archiving solutions. A major question many are struggling with is “which vendor has the best migration solution to move the huge amounts of archived email, attachments and metadata? And can they do it without affecting the integrity of the archived data while accomplishing the migration in the most expedient manner - so end users and therefore productivity is not adversely affected.
For many companies, especially for those with tens or hundreds of terabytes of archived email data, slow extraction performance could mean having to pay for an additional year of legacy archive support.
For example, a legacy email archive migration vendor is of the opinion that migration performance is comprised of two different measures, the extraction speed (from the legacy archive) and the “end to end” migration time (the time it takes to complete the entire migration operation; extraction and ingestion). This vendor takes great pains to make the point that only the “end to end” migration time is the important performance measure because data extraction is only half of the migration challenge. We believe this statement is rather short-sighted and an attempt at misdirection to take the focus off of their lack of performance.
The difference between a parking lot and the open road
The industry standard for migration extraction from a legacy email archive is approximately 300 GB per day (per migration server) – based on the performance of the legacy email archive vendor’s API. Many migration solution providers rely on the APIs supplied by the email archiving vendors to actually perform the extraction. The fact is, legacy email archiving vendors never planned on allowing archived email to be migrated out of their solutions so their APIs were not designed for top performance.
Let’s look at just one example where extraction performance can be important.
A 300 GB per day extraction speed might seem pretty fast but if you are trying to shut down a legacy email archive before the next year’s support agreement is due for renewal then 300 GB per day will seem like a massive slow-moving traffic jam or worse, a major road blockage.
Assume a company has a legacy email archive holding 55 TB of data and wants to migrate it to Office 365 before the email archive support agreement is due to be renewed. One strategy would be to move the data from the archive to a temporary storage location to further cull expired data out and free up the archive and allow it to be decommissioned. At a maximum extraction speed of 300 GB per day, the archive extraction would take 183 plus days (assuming 7 days a week) or over 6 months – not really an optimum timeframe for an email migration project. In reality, you would be faced with another year of paying for an expensive support agreement to keep the legacy email archive up and running.
Is a 94% increase in performance “a good thing”?
Archive360’s Archive 2-Anywhere email archive migration solution has documented extraction speeds of up to 5 TB per day (per server). That means Archive 2-Anywhere would finish the extraction process in 11 days, or approximately 1/3 of a month. The real-life differentiator here is the size of the required extraction horizon; 11 days versus 183 days – a 94% improvement! Avoiding unnecessary legacy archive maintenance costs is definitely a good thing.
Archive360 exceeds the standard performance in the legacy email archive migration industry with the ability to accurately and defensibly extract up to 5TB per day of archived data. Archive360 has vast experience in migrating many of the market-leading email archives. Archive360’s Archive 2-Anywhere has the ability to accurately and defensibly migrate archived email faster than anyone else. If you’d like to move on from your legacy email archive, contact Archive360.
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