Archiving from remote file servers

[Paul_Esson]

Folks,

We are looking at the feasibility of archiving from remote file servers to a central site.  I appreciate that volume of data, frequency of archiving and network bandwidth will all be significant factors, but wondered if anyone had implemented this type of architecture successfully? 

[Liam_Finn1 · Accepted solution]

Paul,

This is how we have implemented FSA. At present we are archiving both local and remote file servers and it works fine. You just need to be careful with the FSA run schedule to ensure you have enough time to get the data you need.

Just an FYI we are archiving but not shortcutting on our FSA runs ( copy and reset)but other than time to recall data it should have little effect and easy to setup.

Liam

Message Edited by Scanner001 on 08-18-2008 04:53 AM

[Steve_C_Blair]

Hi Paul,

If you will send me a PM (with your email address) I'll send you the Best Practises paper I wrote with an Australian customer where they are archiving to a central site, and have many remote sites. I'll also try to get this posted to our blog ASA.....

In their environment, they have a central SAN attached to their central EV-FSA server, then a Windows Server 2003 in each of their major remote offices. In some of their sites they have 155mbps links, in others 10mbps links which is very good for us here as we're somewhat "bandwidth starved" compared to the USA. What is the biggest factor may not necessarily be bandwidth, but archiving time in the day. We found that leaving or not leaving PH's had little effect, it was more serialising one site, then the next, then the next for the initial archive "backlog" that was / is more critical.

Today this customer has about 6TB in their central SAN for Windows FS's, and it took them a bit of time to add each server, but nightly archiving runs work just fine with no worries at all. They have about 7,000 users email archiving, SharePoint archiving, IM, Journal and 4-5TB of PST files with FSA split across 2 quad-CPU EV archiving servers with a seperate Discovery Accelerator server and it works a treat.