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What are the Best practices to manage archiving for 300 file servers

kboorgu
Level 3

We recently implemented Enterprise vault for exchange and are considering implementing FSA and we have about 300 file servers and one EV site. So, I would like to get an idea on how others have implemented the FSA for such a large number of file servers and what the best practices are to manage these.

One method I am thinking is to split these servers into 2 or 3 EV sites with one common directory server and add multiple archiving tasks per site each with a different schedule.

 

Please let me know if you have any ideas and suggestions.

 

Thanks 

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gmackinn
Level 4
Partner Accredited

 I would also separate it from your Exchange infrastructure. We have Exchange archiving in the same directory as our 80 file servers but cannot load it to the extent it was designed for  as it would appear a very large FSA infrastructure loads the directory database significantly.

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7 REPLIES 7

WiTSend
Level 6
Partner

The key is not so much how many file servers, but what will the nightly archive volume be.  With that many file servers I'm suspecting that each one won't have a tremendous amount of files to be archived on a daily basis.  You can figure on being able to run 4-8 archive processes concurrently on a quad core server and depending on the volume you could run another set or two each couple hours.  I don't see a need to have separate EV sites unless there are other extenuating circumstances.    Daily archive volume + number of separate archive tasks will be the defining issues for sizing this environment.

I might suggest that you engage an EV consultant to provide the appropriate design for an environment of this complexity.

MichelZ
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

Yes, this is definitely a question for an EV Consultant which will crunch the numbers...

There are many values which need to be calculated like archiving window, amount of data, amount of users accessing archived data, type of data to be archived and so on. That's not an easy task to answer in a forum ;)

 

Cheers


cloudficient - EV Migration, creators of EVComplete.

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hello,

If you can spare the extra machines, I would go for adding multiple vaultservers to handle these fileservers. But, I do agree with previous posters, ask Symantec. They will be able to get you a good plan to handle this.

Regards. Gertjan

kboorgu
Level 3

Thank you for all the replies.

I did open a case with symantec and the support person told me that having too many servers in one site will slow down the admin console as it has to scan all the file servers everytime the targets folder is expanded. Not sure if that is true.

WiTSend
Level 6
Partner

There are a number of partners that provide EV Consulting.  Some have very experienced architects that would be able to help you  properly size and design this environment. 

gmackinn
Level 4
Partner Accredited

I doubt that EV FSA currently scales to this size in a single directory, the sheer number of archives makes many things unworkable. I'd expect that instead of splitting into sites you would need multiple directory databases to provide reasonable performance. We currently run what I believe to be one of the largest FSA implementations with 80 file servers and cannot use archive explorer for file archives. I'm hoping that the 2010 release which changes indexing and searching dramatically will resolve this but I think you really need to speak to Symantec consulting.

gmackinn
Level 4
Partner Accredited

 I would also separate it from your Exchange infrastructure. We have Exchange archiving in the same directory as our 80 file servers but cannot load it to the extent it was designed for  as it would appear a very large FSA infrastructure loads the directory database significantly.