New to EV. A few questions

[GlennA_2]

Our archiving/e-discovery budget has been tentatively approved and Symantec is top on the list.

I've got a few questions about our proposed environment and appreciate any help/data based on real world experiences.

We have just over 10,000 mailboxes.  Many mailboxes get very little use.

Our numbers:

We send/receive 3,000,000 messages per month or on average 100,000 a day.  Average message size is approximately 15kb.

We have 5 exchange mailbox servers, in 4 physical locations.  It's a single exchange site with decent bandwidth between the 4 locations.

We have about 600GB of data on the 5 exchange servers.  We have about 1.4TB of PSTs scattered over our network (user home drives) that I know about.  There are PSTs I don't know about and I'm sure there are plenty on user workstations as well.

E-Discovery is driving this deployment.  Our lawyers stay pretty busy and they're looking to make their jobs a bit easier.

We have an existing SQL 2005 cluster that's not overly taxed at the moment.  We're planning on using that existing cluster and adding 4 new servers (4 cores, 4gb ram).  I believe the servers will be - 2 EV, 1 Discovery accelerator and 1 journaling.

My questions:  #1, Are we throwing enough hardware at this to be successful?  And #2, how much administrative time will be required to manage a vault of this size?  We're not planning on adding any additional headcount.  We have a single Exchange 2003 admin (me) and this would simply be added as one of my daily duties.  How feasible is that?

thanks for your help!

GlennA

[GertjanA]

Hello Glen,

SQL is no problem. Hardware is sufficient. How about storage?

I suggest you start with mailbox/journal archivng instalation/configuration/usage, and wait with the importing of the pst's. That is a different ball game, and I suggest you get comfortable with running EV. I strongly suggest you ask for the Admin I and II training before configuring EV. This will help in setting it up correct the first time.

Once configured, maintenance should be ok. If the proces is still in the final stage, try to wait for early next year, when version 8.0 is coming out. this has hugely improved storage, and other additional benefits. The DA-server btw does not need to be as high-specs as the actual archiving servers.

We have 70.000+ mbx, 1 sql cluster (4+1), 9 journal servers, 21 mbx servers, 10 exchange clusters (6+1), handling about 300.000 mails a day. Retention is user email indefinite, journal 6 months.

We keep user mailboxes at 50 MB, as we set an aggressive archiving policy.

Good luck.

Gertjan

[Charles_Calabri]

Glenn, since Gertjan addressed your technical question, I'll take just a minute to address your staffing question.  Whether your Enterprise Vault installation will be manageable by you alone really depends on how involved your legal team will be with Discovery Accelerator.

If the Discovery Accelerator will be used extensively, you will want to define your role as a high-level technical admin, rather than the person who configures searches and reviews results.  Many organizations put (in my opinion) too much demand on their email administrator to maintain a e-Discovery or Compliance solution.  Assuming your role is only to create Discovery Administrator users, you should be able handle the Enterprise Vault/Discovery Accelerator environment on your own.

I would, however, recommend professional implementation services to help you get the product installed.  Your software licensing vendor will typically have a resource that they use for this purpose.

Again, good luck!

Charles

[GlennA_2 · Accepted solution]

You're both making me feel better about this upcoming purchase. 

Our lawyers won't do the searches, but I won't either (there's a separate group for that).

I've been trying to get archiving for years.  I'm starting to get excited.

(and yeah, journaling/archiving first.  PST ingestion is phase 2 (or 3 or whatever)).

And we will have both training and professional services onsite for the install.

(we better anyway)