Exchange 2010: Niggling Fears About Storage Requirements

Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 10:00) Wednesday, 09 December 2009 09:40

I was just reading this Ferris piece on Exchange mailbox sizes and thought it would be useful to document Cleartext's strategy for our hosted email clients storage. The Ferris article starts;

'Exchange 2010's database strategy is very interesting. The new Database Availability Groups and the benefits they offer for data protection and quick recovery are striking.

Overall, Microsoft is optimistic that mailboxes will be able to grow to 10GB or more. However, it's unclear how large mailboxes will perform in practice. Several concerns spring to mind:'  read more...

We (Cleartext) offer both mailbox hosting (via an Axigen ISP platform) and SaaS email archiving.

Our strategy is to keep hosted mailboxes as low as 200-500Mb and bundle these mailboxes with the SaaS archiving service for permanent email storage. This has several advantages;

1) Users mailboxes are easier to manage and migrate if needed and are less prone to data loss caused by IT systems issues or more often 'user error'.

2) The SaaS archive has full text and attachment indexing meaning it's quicker and easy to find email when needed.

3) The client can implement their retention policy on the SaaS platform to ensure compliance with eDiscovery regulations. Avoiding issues where staff delete email from their inbox.

This is a change to the usual large mailbox offerings from organisation slike Google but we believe is more appropriate for business deployments.