Athena Archiver Software

Email Archiving + Multi-Server Support

General Questions


How is the Enterprise Software Edition different from the Hosted Edition?

The Enterprise Edition is ideal for companies over 1000 users. Enterprise Edition follows a traditional software pricing model. An initial capital cost and 20% yearly maintenance, with upgrade costs for major updates. There tends to be at least one major update per year and 2-4 incremental updates/patches a year. Enterprise Edition is the only version which supports multi-server configurations and operation in a linux environment. This enables fault-tolerance, 24/7 uptime, and highly reliable mail configurations. For compliance, servers can run in an NSA Security Enhanced Linux Kernal which supports Mandatory Access Controls. In addition, archive storage is unlimited and works with enterprise SANS and high end RAID configurations.

How much does the Enterprise Edition of Athena Archiver cost?

Pricing is determined through a number of factors. The number of mailboxes in the Exchange Server, number of servers, and which options you select. Options include: Legal Support, Policy Management, WORM Storage, and Replication Modules. Migration, support and training are additional cost factors. Call us for a free quote at 212 868 9885.

What kind of ROI (Return on investment) can I expect from deploying Athena Archiver?

Athena Archiver Enterprise Edition can be deployed across the entire organization to provide tremendous productivity gains in the inbox. It's common to save an average of 45-90 minutes a week PER employee by virtually eliminating time waiting for email searches and organizing / deleting email.


Technical Questions


How can your searches be so much faster than everyone elses?

The reason why our searches are so fast is simple. We are the only company to have built a search engine with integrated archiving features. Many competitors use desktop or web search engines for their indexing. However, the biggest problem with those systems are that they suffer tremendous performance penalties when doing things they were not designed to do. For instance, most web search engines did not have a need to have 100% accurate results for legal cases. In order to compensate for such needs, other vendors typically make significant sacrifices to the performance of the system to accommodate such changes. The only other choice for them would be to go back to the drawing board and redesign the search. On the other hand, our search system has no need for such dramatic compromises because future needs have been designed into the system from the beginning. The data structures are optimal for long-term archival and have the ability to be easily updated and extended. In fact, we believe that our search system has lots of room to grow. Our search team is continuously innovating and extending the power of your search system so that you can find what you're looking for instantly.

What are the typical hardware and software requirements necessary for Athena Archiver to run? Will Athena Archiver provide the necessary hardware?

It depends on the load. Athena Archiver can run on a single low power machine for up to 500 users. A high power machine can easily handle 2500-5000 users. Athena will scale to multiple machines to support additional capacity. Athena works with a number of mail servers including Exchange 2000/2003, PostFix, SendMail, and Lotus Notes.

Which databases will be necessary to purchase to get Athena working?

Athena Archiver uses postgres for audit and system logs. Postgres has a few significant advantages over SQL Server including built in clustering capabilities, strict ANSI SQL compliance, and Unix/Windows ports. Not only is it more powerful than SQL Server, but it's also 100% open source and free for commercial use.

How does Athena Archiver store the data?

The Athena Archiver system was designed to be an optimal archiving solution. Data is stored in a large file format, which is similar to databases, but has some significant advantages. Databases are unsuitable for archiving because of the high cost per transaction. Each time a record is inserted into a database, there is a cost to writing the transaction logs, updating indexes for each column, and moving data. As volume increases, the system becomes slow and unusable. Athena Archiver optimizes the data format to support very fast sequential inserts and reads reliably. It is one of the most scalable storage management systems available today, capable of processing millions of emails a day on a single server.