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.

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?)
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).
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.

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.

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.

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.