PArch: a cross-organisational peer-to-peer framework supporting the aggregation and exchange of storage for efficient e-mail archival

The necessity and convenience of e-mails cannot be overemphasised in a business or personal context. Due to the critical information that e-mails often carry, they need to be saved for future reference. However, mail servers and clients have limited storage capacity, requiring e-mails to be archived on secondary storage and retrieved when required. From a technological perspective, the huge amount of e-mails that need to be stored is a major problem, given the limited size and cost of storage. Moreover, governmental regulatory requirements may require organisations to archive e-mails for extended periods of time. Thus, organisations need to invest heavily on creating the necessary storage infrastructure, such as Network-Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) or disk arrays, which provide dedicated storage for e-mail/data archival. However, Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) may not have the necessary resources to ensure the secure storage and fast retrieval of e-mails. This research paper presents Peer Archival (PArch), a novel cross-organisational Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-based framework which utilises the enormous potential offered by P2P networks to provide an efficient and low-cost solution to the e-mail archival problem. The proposed architecture is unique in that P2P networks have not been previously used to address such organisational needs. Experimental results from a prototype implementation demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.