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Email storage for an SMB
An organization of about 3000 people produces about 1TB of email a
year... so if I were just an E-mail administrator, and my company has a email retention policy of 10 years, why cant I buy 20 TB (assuming RAID) of disk space (which is about $15K)... and have some sort of backup policy and delete any files greater than 10 years old via a daemon and be done with it... why do people complicate managing storage of email in the SMB so much? Jon. |
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Email storage for an SMB
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#3
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Email storage for an SMB
Ben wrote: wrote: An organization of about 3000 people produces about 1TB of email a year... so if I were just an E-mail administrator, and my company has a email retention policy of 10 years, why cant I buy 20 TB (assuming RAID) of disk space (which is about $15K)... and have some sort of backup policy and delete any files greater than 10 years old via a daemon and be done with it... A few things I see 1) You'll need at least another 20TB RAID as your backup (what about offsite?) 20TB of backup on tape is cheap... now, restore time can be daunting, but this is where I hope intelligent backup and restore software can help... 2) You don't want to delete files older than 10 years. You want to delete e-mails that are over 10 years old. E-mails are most commonly stored in databases or flatfile mboxes (though not usually for any serious server-store e-mail server). Still, deleting the 10 year old emails saves up the space right? This will keep my storage at a known (not growing) capacity... so I can pre allocate storage for the 3000 users before hand and not have to keep adding storage as the years go on... 3) 3000 clients beating on one computer with one RAID device might be a lot. Modern hardware is pretty fast, though. However, you might want some failover. 3000 people without e-mail is kind of a lot. Failover and backup might force you to more complicated designs. 4) You might not be able to get away with cheap disks (the kind required to get 20TB for $15K). E-mail is a 24/7 high-transaction (lots of seeks) load. Cheap disks tend not to handle this well. Enterprise drives tend to cost a lot. How much would an enterprise class storage solution for 20TB cost then? why do people complicate managing storage of email in the SMB so much? People complicate all sorts of things. Sometimes for good reason; sometimes for not. |
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Email storage for an SMB
How much would an enterprise class storage solution for 20TB cost then?
If we're talking Fibre Channel? Even an enterprise class SATA array can cost 10 times the price you're looking at. Add another 3x for Fibre Channel. To give you some idea, here's a USED 1.3 TB Fibre Channel array selling on ebay for $4500: http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-T3-Storage-A...QQcmdZViewItem All you need is about 15 of 'em. |
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