New partition or new VS on a per year basis? EV9

[Nate_D1]

Hi All,

We are running EV9 and would like to have a new storage unit for each year. Our retention policy states we will keep email for X years, and then it is destroyed. We would like to partition off each year of mail so that its easily removed at the end of X years.  My question is, would a new partition within our existing VS, or an entire new VS under our current VSG (we want to leverage SIS across them) be better for that? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

I did find an area of the admin guide regarding 'managing partition rollover' but it makes no mention of when the best time to do this (off hours? peak hours? maintenance window?) and not much information about how it works on the back end. Do i need to start/stop any services, should my users expect anything as we transition to the new? It also doesnt talk about rollover to a new VS.

Main concern is just how to remove that years worth of email at a time quickly and easily.

Thank you!

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Creating a new partition is definitely the way to go, especially if you are doing user archives.
A user archive can span multiple partitions in the same Vault Store, but it cannot span multiple vault stores.

So for instance if you have a vault store with 1000 users, and you created a new vault store and new vault store partition, all the users when they archive would archive to the original vault store and not the new one, this is because their archive is tied to a particular vault store, and to get them to write to the new one, you would have to use Move Archive to push them from one vault store to another.

As for Partition Rollover, the entire process is pretty quick, i mean a few seconds quick, so if i were you I would set it after the nights archiving run has completed and just before you perform your backups

So for instance if you stop archiving at 1:30am, and your backup kicks in at 2am, then i would have the partition roll over at 1:45am,

[Nate_D1]

One other thing I was going to ask, since this is our first rollover since our initial setup I dont know if things are different for us. The admin guide says: "In each vault store where you use partition rollover, the open partition must be rollover enabled, and there must be at least one ready partition."  but in the properties of my JournalStore and MailStore under the 'Partition Rollover' tab it doesnt show our current partition. Is the initial one just already rollover enabled or do I need to make any settings changes to get started rolling partitions?

Also, do I roll over the journalstore/mailstore in any particular order? or should I set them both to trigger at once and do a timed failover? I have not found any documentation that covers any of this other than in the admin guide :(

-Nate