Controlling the flood: a look at email storage and management challenges - Automated Storage Management

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2002 by Bill Tolson

* The average IT administrator spends up to six hours per week recovering old messages.

* For email messages over a year old, it can take an email administrator up to 11 hours to recover the message.

* IT administrators spend as much as 20% of their time backing up email systems.

Users also spend significant time managing email boxes. On average, users spend 12 minutes looking for each "lost" or archived message and two-to-three hours per week managing emailboxes to comply with company deletion and retention requirements.

When StorageTek tried to quantify the cost of email management without an email management system, we factored in average salaries and time lost to users and found our estimated productivity loss in dollars was $2,013 per employee per year. Multiply that by the 3,270 employees we have at corporate headquarters, and the annual cost to the company topped 350,000 personnel hours or about $6.5 million in lost productivity.

To address that loss, we instituted our own Email Xcelerator solution, which provides a suite of software and hardware to manage Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino email systems more efficiently. We anticipate that Email Xcelerator will slash email-related productivity losses by 90% within a year. Data storage costs will decrease, as well.

A Deluge on the Way

Being a technology company where almost every employee relies heavily on email, StorageTek may be ahead of the crowd in our need to face e-mail challenges. But industry statistics indicate that, eventually, most companies will need to address the burgeoning load of data.

The number of emails employees send and receive is growing at a rate of 29% annually. With the proliferation of attachments, the size of the emails is growing even more dramatically. It's rising 92% each year. A typical 3,000-user email system will handle more than one terabyte of message traffic annually.

To understand what that means in terms of storage management, consider a 3,000-user system where most users receive 60 emails per day with an average size of 50,000 kilobytes. If the average mailbox has a 40,000,000KB limit, it now takes just over 13 days for a mailbox to fill up.

Add in the 29% growth in number of emails and the 92% growth in email size, and by the end of 2003, that same mailbox will fill up in about five and a half days. By the end of 2006, the mailbox will be full before one third of a day has passed. Think about the loss of productivity you're likely to see then.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

3,000       Size of company

            Average number of
60          emails per day per
            employee

50,000      Average size of emails

29%         Growth rate of daily
            emails

92%         Growth rate of the size
            of emails

40,000,000  Average mailbox limit

Year                                  2002        2003        2004

Avg size of emails                   50,000      96,000     184,320
Avg number of emails per emp/day       60          77         100
Avg storage per day per emp        3,000,000   7,392,000   18,432,000
Avg mailbox limit                  40,000,000  40,000,000  40,000,000
Days before mailbox limit reached    13.33        5.41        2.17

Year                                  2005        2006

Avg size of emails                  353,894      679,477
Avg number of emails per emp/day      129          166
Avg storage per day per emp        45,652,326  112,793,182
Avg mailbox limit                  40,000,000  40,000,000
Days before mailbox limit reached     0.88        0.35