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SolarP
Level 6
14 years ago
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Quick Centera Question

Hi All

A quick question about using EMC Centeras and EV as I ahve a ustomer whoi has one and wants to use it for a new EV instalation.

If I have a single EV server which will perform email archiving and also email journaling would I have just one Vault store with Centera partition in it accessing a single pool configured on the Centera.

Or would you have two centera pools one for archiving and one for journal and have two vault stores  with each having a centera partition pointing to separate pools .

Also what is the advantages and disadvanteges of both

 

Thanks in advance

  • This is absolutely correct. Unlike NTFS whee sharing the same storage location will cause dataloss, Centera uses a content addressed storage and each item (or collection of items if you are using collections), regardless of Vault Store Parition, will have a unique clip id which ev will retrieve from. . .therefore you will not lose the data.

     

    This is a fine, supported, and by many- prefered configuraiton.

  • http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6790-symantec-enterprise-vault-centera-wp.pdf

    You may want to have a look at the PDF above.  

    In regards your question I am not a Centera expert so could be wrong, but i dont think having a seperate pool will help with performance, but it more of an admin thing for permissions etc.  Personally speaking I prefer to have a seperate journal Vault Store as I find it easier to manage and you could benefit from imroved SQL performance perhaps (depending on config). 

     

     

     

  • you can still have a seperate vault store for journaling in EV. on the centera you can have everything in one pool.

  • Yes I have seen that document and there is no actual advice about mutiple vault stores.

    I am just wondering if there is any reason if you would have multiple vault stores

  • Just really as I mentioned previously to separate these out for admin purposes.  For example if you want to only share within vault store on the Single Instancing Side of things you may wish to then separate out the Journal Vault Store, however not so applicable on Centera.  Also for sizing and maintenance reasons, perhaps place the Vault Stores on different SQL servers for performance, or the Databases on different disks again for performance. There is so many reasons and no right or wrong answer, it is all about what fits best in your organization.  Personally as I mentioned I like to have multiple Databases for admin purposes.  

  • I have done several EV to Centera implementations ,I would recommend  2 separate Vault Stores but one Pool for the reasons mentioned.

     

    Also when you configure the Sharing don't share within the VS Group but rather within the VS .Even though Centera uses its own SIS this can become an issue if  you need to write data back to another storage device and your Mailbox and Journal data has different Retention Periods.

  • Thanks Bruce

    So if I have a single server with two vault stores each would need a separate centera partition within them.

    If I only had one pool configured within the Centera, that  one pool could be used for both Centera partitions in the two vault stores. Is this correct?

  • This is absolutely correct. Unlike NTFS whee sharing the same storage location will cause dataloss, Centera uses a content addressed storage and each item (or collection of items if you are using collections), regardless of Vault Store Parition, will have a unique clip id which ev will retrieve from. . .therefore you will not lose the data.

     

    This is a fine, supported, and by many- prefered configuraiton.