The primary reason we are looking at a file server archive is due to backups. Our primary file server has over 700 GB of storage and is growing at an ever increasing rate. The weekly full backups on this server alone take over 15 hours to complete and at the rate of growth we have seen will take nearly 24 hours to complete before much longer. Much of this data (probably 75%) is unchanging, redundant, and seldom accessed. The thought was that having an archive would consolidate the stagnant data to a location that could be backed up less often speeding up the full backups on this server.
Email archive being pushed for compliance reasons more than anything else. Getting rid of PST files and the improved performance of smaller OST files are fringe benefits. Since we are needing to implement both types of solutions, we thought that a product that does both together would be ideal, but others responses indicate that may not be the best plan. Does anyone have any recommendations given the above scenario? -----Original Message----- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 5:14 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Archiving Solution On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 14:16, Mike Tellson <[email protected]> wrote: > My company is looking to implement an archiving solution for both file > servers and exchange mailboxes. After several vendors came out and gave a > “dog and pony show” the two products that appear to be what we are looking > for are CommVault Simpana and Sunbelt’s Exchange archiver & File archiver. > Does anyone on this list have experience with either of these products? > What are your opinions of each (good, bad, or ugly)? I have some peripheral experience with the Sunbelt stuff - I didn't implement it myself, and it was given to one of my minions by the IT manager, which pissed me off no end. o- Don't mix the implementation of the two products - Just. Don't. In particular, don't mix the archive files into the same directories. o- Make sure you don't throw random crappy old hardware at it. My next points are true of any complex solution like this: o- Don't give it to a junior sysadmin to implement. o- Make sure you have a comprehensive plan for implementation and testing Specific issues that come to mind immediately: o- We had to make exceptions for several different file types (.mdb, CAD drawings, and some others) because the clients couldn't stand the wait time for the retrieval from the archiver, and the client would hang, and then we'd have to unarchive the file manually. o- Once the emails and files have been archived and mingled in the directories created on the archive server, there is no distinguishing them, in any way. We cheaped out and used an older server with poor RAID hardware for the OS drives, and we're still paying the price. There are other problems, but I'll leave you with a bit of philosophy: o- Adding more disk is probably cheaper than trying to do file archiving. The cost of the software and the maintenance/management overhead almost certainly more expensive than adding more disk. o- Email archiving is the same story with one caveat: the only real justification for it: Legal protection. If you need email archiving for regulatory compliance, customer service or contractual issues, you're good to go. Otherwise, don't do it. Kurt ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
