Stephen Spence's blog Spence at North Seas makes the argument that in the early days of networking, things like print sevices and file management were separate applications that are now part of the networking infrastructure. He suggests that email archiving is following the same path and uses as an example the QStar Technologies SntryStr storage appliance, announced at CEBIT two weeks ago.
Interesting idea, but I think it misses the point. Anybody can store email messages and networked storage makes a great deal of sense. The real problem is that archiving should be about retrieval -- and very fast retrieval using a variety of techniques. There are also legal issues about documenting the chain of custody in a message if you plan to produce your search results as evidence. I think that will require a specialized application. This may be a networked application running on an appliance -- but it is not a storage problem.
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