Towards the Design of a Scalable Email Archiving and Discovery Solution

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel approach to specialize a general purpose Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System into an Email Archiving and Discovery (EAD) System. The magnitude and range of compliance risks associated with the management of EAD is driving investment in the development of more effective and efficient approaches to support regulatory compliance, legal discovery and content life-cycle needs. Companies must recognize and address requirements like legal compliance, electronic discovery, and document retention management. What is needed today are EAD systems capable to process very high message ingest rates, support distributed full text indexing, and allow forensic search such to support litigation cases. All this must be provided at lowest cost with respect to archive management and administration. In our approach we introduce a virtualized ECM repository interface where the key content repository components are wrapped into a set of tightly coupled Grid service entities, such to achieve scale-out on a cluster of commodity blade hardware that is automatically configured and dynamically provisioned. By doing so we believe, we can leverage the strength of Relational Database Management Systems and Full Text Indexes in a managed clustered environment with minimal operational overhead.