Archiving best practice?

[999Dom999]

Even though we now have bigger disks we get huge amounts of emails with large attachments. Everyone are too scared to delete any emails and the 2gb mail file limit is now out the window with some now getting to 10GB+. We have one server and about 60 users with email.

I have set up archiving on an individual basis to their computer and when it gets to around 4gb I set up a another archive file and burn the last on to dvd as a backup. This is quite a long process and will take ages to do everyones. I would much rather be able to archive everyones mail files to one central location.

Is there a nice 3rd party app to handle archiving, or is archiving to the server easy to setup? I have a couple of spare slots so could add some big drives. These would not be in the main domino root is it possible to get domino to use these drives or perhaps better a remote storage server, is it possible to get domino to archive to disks at remote locations?

If anyone is doing this do you keep backups of your archives? How do you do this? To expensive tape, or disk to disk backups? This is how I currently back up our domino server and so far it works a treat backing up to 2TB drives. No failed backups due to bad tapes or someone forgetting to put a tape in etc, very easy straight forward restores with no need to find the tape and put in the drive.

I have seen big disk storage units but to get a decent size - 2TB+ ideally 5-10TB cost an absolute fortune but would be great to have a massive reliable fault tolerent set up, for all backups of all servers.

So I'd like to know what other people currently have in place?

Many thanks in advance for your replies!

 

[m4ilm4n]

I don't know what you'd consider a fortune, but we use a CoRAID AoE chassis with 15 1-TB drives - including the controller server, total cost was around $21K. Still working on setting up the Symantec e-vault software, tho.

 

[999Dom999]

Nope thats not a fortune, all our servers are IBM and I was looking at their kit, the chassis's alone are very expensive and the disks are are too. Are you putting that in some sort of raid configuration? Is this for data storage will you be backing up these drives, or is this being used for backup?

I'm off to google your kit, and see what e-vault is!

 

[m4ilm4n]

We have a ton of IBM 3650-series servers - they are very solid; we also have some SunFires running Linux that are very cost-effective.

The CoRAID is for archival purposes to meet legal and audit requirements; the e-vault software basically forks a copy of each message into the vault. That allows users to delete or archive what they want, since an historical copy already resides in the vault. The drives in the vault are RAID-6 with a hot spare.

 

[gsavy]

hello

we don't use a third party application, we only use another domino server with sata disk.

we created an archive policy and it's automatic for user

and our user are limited to 150MB on their mailbox, so their archive a lot.

 

[999Dom999]

Thanks for your reply. We get huge amounts of emails and attachments, average size of a mail file is about 3GB.

Do you back up the domino server that holds the archives?

 

[gsavy]

yes I do it with Time Navigator and used to do it with TSM and TDP for Domino