Need design advice

[ANDREY_FYODOROV]

Hello everyone. We have a very dispersed company with offices in Florida, New York, California, Canada, a bunch of Caribbean islands, a bunch of European countries, Australia, etc. We have a pretty fast WAN, but still copying a couple of GBs of data from NA to EU causes delays on the network.

So far the design that the KVS engineers came up with calls for two EV servers in our Geneva datacenter, pulling data from all our offices and writing archives to a SAN.

I am having second thoughts about this. I can imagine how EV will grab someone's 2GB PST and start copying it from Canada or from Bahamas to the locator directory on the EV server in Geneva.

What I am thinking is that maybe it will be a better idea to install a local EV in Canada, let it archive all the old data to a large disk enclosure (like MSA1000), and then ship all that to Geneva.

I know the vault can be moved from one EV server to another pretty easily by editing the tables in SQL, I have done this in the lab without a problem.

But is it feasable to also transfer the data from the disk enclosure like MSA1000 to a SAN so that EV wouldn't lose it?

[Alan_M]

Can you share more information on your Exchange environment (location, capacity, etc) and user counts at each location.

[ANDREY_FYODOROV]

32 Exchange 2003 servers, 10 Administrative Groups: NA, EU, BER (Bermuda), CUR (Curacao), SFO (San Francisco), SYD (Sydney), EUROPE, MIL (Milan), MON (Monaco), NYN (Switzerland)

The AGs are like this because out Exchange 5.5 sites were like this. We migrated each Exchange 5.5 site to a respective Exchange 2003 AG.

Some AGs contain servers from various geographic locations, some only have one server.

For example SFO has only one SanFran server with ~100 users.

BER has only one Bermuda server with ~50 users.

SYD has onle one Syd server with ~100 users.

NA has servers from Miami (50), Fort Lauderdale (100), NYC1 (200), NYC2 (200), Nassau (100), Cayman (200), Toronto (400).

EU has servers from Geneva (50), Zurich (50), Amsterdam (400), Dublin 1 (200), Dublin 2 (200), Luxembourg (50).

MIL has one server with ~ 50 users

MON has one server with ~50 users

NYN has one server with ~50 users

CUR has one server with ~400 users

WAN links are mostly 1Mbps, some are even 2 or 4Mpbs, but there are a couple links that are only 256Mpbs

[Lee_Allison]

Andrey, you're biggest amount of pain will be (like always) when you initially enable the users and have to pull the first large load of mail out of their boxes across the WAN links. But once that is done you won't be killing that bandwidth as badly.

However, if your concern is large PST files, you have several options to handle that issue without redesigning the entire deployment. Don't redesign based on a scenario that will hardly every emerge and that you can easily mitigate.

But in either case talk with the SYMC guys who wrote up the deployment and voice your concerns to them.

[Alan_M]

I would defintely concur with Lee about re-visiting the design with Symantec although if your budget can afford it I would press for a more segmented design. The cost will rise dramatically but putting EV and SQL closer to your users is the only way to reduce WAN traffic. Look at WAN utilization and bandwidth availability and see where the segmentation makes sense. For example, having EV boxes in NA and EU looks like it would make sense.

One side note you really should consider consolidating your Exchange environment. You have very few users on any given box and if you have good WAN links you could simplify your topolgy tremendously. This would have a nice tie in with an EV implementation as well.

> Andrey, you're biggest amount of pain will be (like
> always) when you initially enable the users and have
> to pull the first large load of mail out of their
> boxes across the WAN links. But once that is done you
> won't be killing that bandwidth as badly.
>
> However, if your concern is large PST files, you have
> several options to handle that issue without
> redesigning the entire deployment. Don't redesign
> based on a scenario that will hardly every emerge and
> that you can easily mitigate.
>
> But in either case talk with the SYMC guys who wrote
> up the deployment and voice your concerns to them.

[ANDREY_FYODOROV]

Thanks.

We were hoping to consolidate Exchange after archiving the users mailboxes. Even though some Exchange servers don't have too many users on them, many of these users have ~2-3GB mailboxes (in addition to large PSTs).

I am hoping that we could come up with a "travelling" EV server that would report to the main EV servers in Geneva. I am not sure if this is feasible though. Is it possible to do this for example - send an EV server to Bermuda, have it archive stuff there, then ship the archived data to Geneva and send the travelling EV server to Bahamas, archive there, ship data to Geneva, send the travelling EV server to the next location, etc.

[Alan_M]

It would be unusal to have a travelling server. You would have to think through the implications of when and where data was being archived. You would also need to make sure that DNS records were maintained accurately depending on its location. Other than this it should work.

You might just consider throttling the number of items that are being processed per mailbox. This would give you some control over bandwidth utilization and as long as this number was higher than the number of new emails per mailbox you would catch up eventually.


> Thanks.
>
> We were hoping to consolidate Exchange after
> archiving the users mailboxes. Even though some
> Exchange servers don't have too many users on them,
> many of these users have ~2-3GB mailboxes (in
> addition to large PSTs).
>
> I am hoping that we could come up with a "travelling"
> EV server that would report to the main EV servers in
> Geneva. I am not sure if this is feasible though. Is
> it possible to do this for example - send an EV
> server to Bermuda, have it archive stuff there, then
> ship the archived data to Geneva and send the
> travelling EV server to Bahamas, archive there, ship
> data to Geneva, send the travelling EV server to the
> next location, etc.