The FusionStorm Email Server Assessment (ESA) service aims to assist organizations in more fully understanding what their email environment looks like today, how it is being used, and how to plan for future needs. Microsoft Exchange serves as the email application for many organizations, and in today’s normal business activities, email has become the de facto tool for communication and collaboration.

As email becomes more engrained in the daily operations of an organization, the demands, both in terms of storage capacity and overall system performance will naturally grow. As time elapses, the information stores will begin to grow beyond the original design and specifications, and the email infrastructure will no longer be able to service the end user according to the service level agreements set for this environment.

Enter FusionStorm. Our goal is to understand the email infrastructure in its totality. This entails:
    • Interviews with the relevant stakeholders in the environment
    • Data collection and analysis of the environment
    • An assessment report detailing:
        • Overall infrastructure as it is today
        • Remediation options for today’s pain points
        • Long-term strategies for tomorrow’s needs


How do we achieve this? It begins with talking to those involved with managing the environment, and understanding at the organization level how the email is used, the administrators’ understanding of the environment, and any other relevant information that the stakeholders can provide. From there, we perform some non-disruptive, agent-less data gathering on the Exchange environment, up to two (2) Exchange servers, gathering key metrics such as:
    • Email storage growth rate: how fast is email growing overall
    • Email message aging: what percentage of email is older than X days, and perhaps not needed in the primary data store
    • Email attachments: what percentage and age of overall storage consumed by attachments
    • Mailbox statistics: how many emails per mailbox, mailbox size


After the data is collected, we will return the results in an assessment report within three to five (3-5) business days.

What benefit does this provide at the end of the day? By gaining a better overall understanding of how the environment is as it is today, both in terms of performance and capacity, the assessment allows an organization to improve the day-to-day management, understand performance, and plan for future needs. In doing these we reap the following benefits:
    • Optimize utilization of the storage capacity to match service level requirements with the appropriate storage technologies
    • Identify opportunities for relocating older, un-accessed data to cheaper storage tiers
    • Determine methods for improving the overall backup strategy through archiving
    • Improve recovery capabilities by reducing the size of backups
    • Discover non-business related usage of files and email
    • Identify how much storage is being consumed by .PST files
    • Understand the overall TCO of the environment and ways to maximize ROI


The following is an example of some findings from an ESA. From the two Exchange servers scanned, Customer X key metrics are summarized below:

Overall email storage:
    Grew 54% from 421GB to 646GB over the past 120 days
    82% of all emails scanned were over 60 days old
    80% of the overall email storage was consumed by data over 60 days old
    92% of the overall email storage was consumed by attachments
    The file system analysis found an additional 17 PST’s totaling 19.23GB.


Email profiling analysis environment:
    2 email servers analyzed: Exch01, Exch02
    Total storage scanned: 646.32GB
    Email messages scanned: 3,742,411
    Email attachments scanned: 1,788,507
    Email attachment storage: 597.26GB
    Mailboxes scanned: 447
    Average message size: 14KB
    Average attachment size: 350KB
    Emails with attachments: 48%