New Capabilities Improve Storage Efficiency by Archiving Calendar Items, Contacts and Tasks

Campbell, Calif., April 28, 2010, Barracuda Networks Inc. today announced new features for the Barracuda Message Archiver that allow users to archive calendar items, contacts and tasks from Microsoft Exchange making it the first appliance- based solution to offer this capability.

This new capability complements the Barracuda Message Archiver Exchange stubbing feature, helping administrators to minimize a users Exchange storage footprint. With the Exchange stubbing feature, administrators can increase storage efficiency by moving email attachments from the Exchange server to the Barracuda Message Archiver while maintaining seamless access to those attachments for end users.

The new features in the Barracuda Message Archiver coupled with attachment stubbing, combine to make a powerful solution for administrators looking to enhance operational efficiency of their Microsoft Exchange deployments, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks. By enabling users to access online archives of all their Microsoft Exchange items, they can satisfy their users need to access data while better managing Exchange mailbox sizes and their associated storage costs.

By archiving all Exchange data, the Barracuda Message Archiver enables administrators to eliminate the use of PST files. PST files are archival files created in the Microsoft Exchange environment that contain emails, calendar items, contacts and tasks and are typically stored on a user's laptop or desktop to reduce the amount of data stored on the server. Organizations have been looking for ways to eliminate PST because they are hard to manage, prone to corruption and pose a security risk if accessed by an unauthorized user.

While competing solutions focus only on archiving emails, both from PST files and from Exchange directly, the Barracuda Message Archiver's ability to archive calendar items, contacts and tasks in addition to emails allow administrators to import all items stored in a PST file directly to the appliance for easy search and retrieval. In addition, offloading all Microsoft Exchange data to the Barracuda Message Archiver significantly improves email server performance by allowing administrators to better manage the size of mailboxes and keep the Microsoft Exchange server running efficiently.

The latest Barracuda Message Archiver release also includes a tool that allows administrators to import emails from IBM Lotus Domino NSF files. This import capability ensures that organizations using an IBM Lotus Domino server will be able to archive, search and retrieve historical email.

For more information, whitepapers are available here.