EMAIL ARCHIVING NOW LOW COST AND EASY Following UK Distribution Deal Between OTG and OptoMedia

OTG Software Inc., best known for their XtenderSolutions for storage, messaging and content management, has appointed OptoMedia Storage Solutions as the principal trade distributor in the UK and Ireland for its new, low cost, EmailXtender Archive software for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

OptoMedia Storage Solutions

PRESS INFORMATION

9th May 2002

EMAIL ARCHIVING NOW LOW COST AND EASY
Following UK Distribution Deal Between OTG and OptoMedia

OTG Software Inc., best known for their XtenderSolutions for storage,
messaging and content management, has appointed OptoMedia Storage Solutions
as the principal trade distributor in the UK and Ireland for its
new, low cost, EmailXtender Archive software for Microsoft Exchange
and Lotus Notes.

"In terms of its price - 4,500 including 12 months' support - and simple
installation - we had it out of the box and running in eight minutes - OTG
EmailXtender Archive has achieved a major breakthrough," says David Ball,
Director of OptoMedia, based in Salisbury.

"It may lack some of the sophisticated search and knowledge management
facilities of the leading email archiving systems costing five times the
price, but when it comes to the essential requirement to reduce the load on
email servers by automatically removing space-consuming attachments and
seldom accessed messages, EmailXtender Archive is by far the most cost
effective product on the market."

With the Companies Act now giving B2B emails the same legal status as
the printed document, comes the legal requirement to keep business and
contracted emails for seven years. And with the number of emails growing by
80% per annum, this presents the IT Manager with a major storage problem.

Automatic email archiving is, in consequence, now moving from being 'nice to
have' to being 'an essential requirement' for all companies, both large and
small. OTG's EmailXtender Archive is the first low cost and easy to install
solution to this requirement. And since it can support up to 2,000 users
(with add-on modules costing 1,500 adding a further 2,000 users at a time)
it is aimed at both SME and corporate customers.

How It Works
EmailXtender Archive performs the task of removing emails and their
attachment in three stages. The first is to replicate the email server data
onto an archive server. This function is performed with no direct
application software being installed on the Exchange server.

Once the data has been copied to the archive server, attachments can then be
deleted from the Exchange server at a given age. When the attachment has
been deleted a link replaces the attachment, pointing the email server to
the archive server where the email has been stored and from where it may
be retrieved.

Typically this operation will reduce the data size on the email server by
60 - 80%. The effect of this reduction not only improves the performance of
the email server but it makes managing the server quicker and easier and,
with the attachments being in the archive, the backup cycle typically only
takes a third of the original time.

For emails over a given age, the third option is deleting the email
completely from the email server while retaining it in the archive. This
could be performed on emails over 12, 24 or 36 months of age or perhaps just
emails over seven years old. Deleted emails may also be searched for by
dates, sorted by sender, recipient or title, and then retrieved by the
administrator for return to the user's email account.

Managing the Archive Servers Storage:

Having removed the data from the email server and migrated it to an archive
server, which may initially have been equipped with a 100GB RAID device,
what happens when this volume becomes full?

The last thing system administrators want is to have to keep moving from one
server to the next. With DiskXtender (DX), another OTG product,
this is not an issue as it enables the user to migrate data from the archive
server to a range of optional storage devices such as NAS, DVD, optical and
tape libraries, or even to a Tivoli Storage Manager environment.

In addition to moving the data from the archive server, DX can produce
a second or third copy of the data for remote backup storage, and by
deploying additional DataManagers within DX, it is possible to archive
from other Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 servers to the shared NAS
or library.

For Further Information:
David Ball
OptoMedia Storage Solutions Ltd.
Chalke House
3 Brunel Road
Salisbury
Wiltshire
SP2 7PU, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1722 413600
Fax: +44 (0) 1722 413606
E-mail: davidb@optomedia.co.uk
Web: www.optomedia.co.uk

Press Enquiries, Photos and Screenshots:
Tony Bovill
Consort PR Consultants Ltd.
Berrybridge House
Devenish Road
Sunningdale
Berkshire
SL5 9SH, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 626171
Fax: +44 1344 626612
E-mail: tony@consortpr.co.uk
Web: www.consortpr.co.uk
(where this release is available)