New Volume to hold EV partitons?

[Satyendra]

Hello,

I got a storage volume where we dump all EV archived items collected by (Mailbox Archiving task) split into partitions of size 100GB each.

This volume has now reached 8TB and can't be expanded further, do we have any risk in creating a new volume and start dumping data into it.

I guess it shouldn't matter as EV index will keep track of where the items are going. Please correct if I am wrong?

Note:- This volume is a part of dedicated storage system, not directly connected to EV server!

Thanks in Advance!

[TonySterling]

No, there is not a problem in doing this.  Just set up a new partition in the Vault Store that points to the new storage volume and make it the open partition. 

Regards,
Tony

[Satyendra]

Thanks Tony,

I also got to know that the old volume will still grow but not as fast as before.... Is this true?

[Liam_Finn1]

This is true there could be some growth in the old partition

[MichelZ]

Thought 16 TB is the volume limit on NetApp...

[TonySterling]

You could take some of the 100 GB partitions and move them to a different drive. 

[JesusWept3]

the only time a closed paritition can grow is if Collections are enabled, in which it extracts the DVS as ARCHDVS (or ARCHDVSSP/ARCHDVSCC)
However after that, the items will cease to grow.

Index locations however, if you close them, they will continue to grow until all the active indexes in that location perform an index roll over, which with regular mailbox archiving isn't likely to happen any time soon.

[Satyendra]

Okay!

I change my partition volume with new, the old volume still has got 84GB of free space left.

Ill have to keep an eye on the free space to see by what rate its getting dropped till the .cab files are build in the old volume partition, also i looked at the collection setting on partition and found it to be set with these parameter

Start - 10AM
End - 4PM
Max file size - 10MB
Age - 10Days (From DVS file creation day?)

I read this article - https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-collections-and-sparse-collections-work and what i understood is this....

EV archive items and stores in .DVS files > Collector puts this DVS files together and creates .CAB files to assist backup jobs > So only .CAB files are backedup > When storage expiry happens the actual .DVS files are deleted not the .CAB untill all the ref .DVS files are deleted by storage expiry > If so once the .cab files are build archived items are pulled from these .cab files right?

If the free space gets exausted i will have to move some of the old partition folders off that volume!

[Satyendra]

I am observing funny behaviour with the old volume, the free space on it dropped from 84GB > 83GB > 84GB.

Looking at the above setting "Age" when i go back to older partition and search for *.cab i don't see the files generated however when i go to too old partition i see .cab files generated......

Confused about cab files :(

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

OK i thought the article I wrote would explain it quite well but it is a confusing subject

The basics are as follows

1. Items get created, lets say there are a hundred items
2. A cab file is created with those 100 items
3. If an item is accessed in that CAB file it is extracted to its original location as an ARCHDVS
4. After several days if the item isn't accessed again, it will delete the ARCHDVS

If you have hundreds of thousands of CAB files and someone sets up Vault Cache and takes in 100,000 items, you would then have 100,000 ARCHDVS files knocking around, if those items equate to 1GB then you now have 1GB of storage taken up temporarily until they are deleted again.

Then lets say you run storage expiry

1. 50 out of the 100 items are expired out of a CAB file
2. Although the CAB file has 100 items in it, only 50 of them are active, though the expired items are NOT deleted
3. instead by default it has to wait until the CAB file only has 15% active items, so for the old items to be deleted, it needs at least 75 of those items have to be deleted in the CAB
4. when it hits 15% or lower, it will then extract the final fifteen and delete the cab entirely

Space reclaimation under a Collection is very difficult to predict

[Satyendra]

Thank you for the explaination.....

Looks like in my environment .cab creation is not happening as per the schedule specified in the collections tab on partition....!