What is a good alternative to email archive appliances for MS Exchange? [closed]

I'm currently using a Barracuda Networks Message Archiver 350 appliance for email archiving (since 2008). I've been updating the Barracuda firmware as soon as a new version is released.

The Barracuda appliance ran out of space this year and I started using external storage. Some of the archive is stored on the appliance and another part of it is stored on a network shared drive.

Recently, after the latest firmware version was installed, the Barracuda appliance started showing 100% CPU usage and 100% memory usage.

I got on the phone with Barracuda support and they remoted into the Barracuda appliance and rebuilt the archive.

The problem was that I had a 15 day junk email retention policy and every day when junk emails emails older than 15 days would be deleted, the whole archive would get re-indexed. This re-indexing would cause the 100% CPU usage and 100% memory usage.

Barracuda support just changed the junk email retention policy so that junk emails are stored but not deleted after 15 days (so the deletion event does not cause a complete re-index process)

Now, junk emails are just continually stored on the shared drive and never get deleted which is not really a good solution.

This hack is working, but Barracuda support is stating that the hardware is too old and that I should upgrade to the latest and greatest appliance (which costs approximately $7,000) Apparently the appliance I have is too slow (CPU), it does not have enough memory and storage. I can not upgrade the appliance memory or storage as doing so would void the support agreement.

I don't want to buy the latest and greatest Barracuda appliance now. Moreover, in 5 years, when the latest and greatest Barracuda appliance is obsolete, I don't want to buy the latest and greatest Barracuda appliance. If I buy a new appliance now, in 2012, then I'd have to buy the latest and greatest Barracuda appliance of 2017 after the 2012 hardware no longer "cuts it".

I don't want to use Exchange 2010 pst personal archiving because to search a pst archive it needs to be moved/copied across the network.

Is there an email archiving solution that I can use on a commodity server (Linux or Windows) that will archive and index all incoming and outgoing emails (a 500 GB archive)?

I'm open to proprietary and OSS solutions.

Solution 1:

Why not just stick a linux server in-line with an MTA of your choice? It would be trivially easy to have sendmail, postfix, etc. archive locally then relay to the Exchange server?