Tools for the job

To address the immediate burgeoning email problem, companies often throw more storage at the issue or simply restrict email inbox sizes. Typically IT will have multiple copies of the same email, one for archive, one for backup, plus one copy of what is known as a journal copy of the email. Journal copies are made to help indexing and searching. Backups of the journal are often also made.

Burton at Symantec believes to make storage of email more efficient there should be one copy of the data for each operation. He envisages two copies of the same data, one for primary immediate use and one for archiving/backup/journal use.

Symantec's latest technology features "commonality factoring" to help consolidate information or email within servers. This eliminates common blocks of data so that when backups are made, an administrator can flag already-copied blocks of data so that only new information is backed up. This consolidation dramatically reduces excess unnecessary storage, claimed Burton.

EMC also offers similar technology allowing for automated archiving and data compression as well as ensuring that there's only one copy of data for archive and backup purposes, said Fung.