With Exchange 2003 I can't remember if it is up to 4 storage groups per server with 5 databases each or if its the other way around. Anyway, while I don't condone using 1 TB pluse storage groups. Groups much larger than 200 GB are going to exist out there.
I would just add that using LANFree backup you can achieve some pretty fast backup speeds as well. We backed up a 500 GB SQL database in a few hours. Of course actual milage may vary. A question for Del: Will the TDP for Exchange ever have a striping feature like the TDP for SQL or is that a Microsoft limitation with Exchange -vs- SQL. Kyle "Stapleton, Mark" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of fred johanson >The guys next door are rolling out our pilot project Exchange >server. Right now they're comfortable with the TDP and its >capabilities. For the near future, differential backups with >an occasional >full backup to truncate the Exchange log will suffice. But they wonder >what happens when they move from a few dozens users to hundreds or >thousands, and the "data\0001\Public Folder Store" approaches >the Tb range >or larger. Will there be enough hours in the day to do a full >backup? If >not, how does the log get truncated? They're already asking about >Flashcopy and NAS and large images. All answers are appreciated. A strong word of encouragement: Do not let your Exchange environment evolve into one store running in the TB range. Break up your storage groups into several smaller storage groups, or (better yet) use multiple Exchange servers. This not only makes sense, but it's also the Microsoft recommendation. As an example, let's use 3 hours as a maximum for "reasonable" full backups. Assuming you can get 5MB/sec on backups (actually a little slow for a 100Mb network): 3 hours = 10800 seconds x 5MB/sec = 54GB for a 3 hour backup These are conservative stats. The customer I'm adminning TSM for right now got one of last night's information store backups (of 82.8GB) in 8440 seconds--almost 10MB/sec--on a 10/100 network. Further: I would not bother with differential backups. One full backup per day, with perhaps an incremental backup 12 hours after the full, would guarantee a maximum of 12 hours of data loss in the event of a catastrophe and subsequent restore. (Of course, you could do a daily full, and incrementals at 8 and 16 hours after the backup, for even greater minimization of data loss.) -- Mark Stapleton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Office 262.521.5627 --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. Learn more.
